Birthday Meditations

Midnight is blue on your face. Your phone screen
draws from you the first fireflies. Happy Birthday texts
lightening the eyes, bloom heart-shaped mushroom clouds,
and settle. So they settle. Burdens of love dissolving.
Thoughts take their eternal postures in the mind.
The bones say, how you must do better. There are good
things you must do for your mother, who calved you
so exquisitely. Took grief from you for years so
you could be cleverer. Fed you milk for brittle thoughts.
You wonder what she would tell you with Christ’s blood
raised high. Take better vows than mine. Straighten your
spine. Bathe consistently. Idle less time listening to men.
Indulge in sugar, beware sugared lips. Life
is beautiful with your darkened knees. Look back
at your sloppy nights in parking lots with love, for
you were brought here to do it all. Dare to be doomed
to repeat it again. Simply scrub your underwear
with peroxide to remove the stains. In your house
there is no shame. You will shed something today.
In hours, the ancestors will take their tongues
and lap the sky clean, leaving your future buoyed
with the satellites and those one or two remaining stars.
Grieve, and you will be better. Every day, you will rise.