Bookmarked

My mind slips
Like a stack of books on a desk
When one near the bottom
Is a little smaller
Then all the rest —

It’s a slow slide at first
Like glaciers melting
But then it’s all
Very fast,
Which is also like glaciers
When they break
And fall into the sea,

(And sometimes my mind slips
Because
I’m thinking about
glaciers
melting)

Of course this usually happens
In the middle of the night,
And it sounds like an intruder
That no one else can hear

And when I try
To set everything
Right again, no matter
How
Slowly
I
Try
To
Breathe,

My mind remains like a book
With a broken spine,
Lying open to a poem
About shame and regret

And when I try to pick myself up
Each page-memory
Weighs a hundred pounds
And I am small, like an ant
And each book is actually a mirror

So I’m crawling every which way
Looking for myself
In between glass shards and bad luck,
And I whisper,
I swear I left myself right here

Until the next hour,
The next morning,
The next day, week, month—Aha! Finally!
I find myself again
And it’s a feeling
Like when I read that wolves
Are making a comeback in the wild
A feeling like
Maybe everything will be okay

Then I begin stacking books again,
Always a little
Unbalanced
But trying so hard
(Which is, honestly, so like me)
To make sense of it all