Losing My Mind

If I wake at four am and cannot get back to sleep

it’s because my mind insists on attention

it’s hungry for  words to record feelings

tangled in reason and memory

it screams

get me out of here!

It demands blood to break down the plaque

clinging to white cells curling around that time 

I walked home from school crying, unable to explain

just the heart pumping

“do something”

it’s broken.

I know in my organs how broken

now I must find out what IT is.

Now I must make a cogent argument in one 

or six stanzas on how and why my mind loses

the story every night when I sleep

because if I don’t do this, all the tensions

all the insights—will be eaten by maggots

in my grave and I will know then 

I am more popular than I have ever been.

It’s nature’s way of reclaiming

what was always hers

where belonging is in the universe.