I try not to let myself forget that I'm not the only collage of a person.
Taped-glued-rubber-cemented fragments of a past that we all shared
and all forgot and all remembered again together when
we read about it in the headlines or in the want ads for
lost tabby cats named ginger.

I am not the only person to ever be broken and neither are you. I won't
lie to you and tell you that I ever was more than a flower girl
at a backyard wedding who didn't want to throw
rose petals because she wanted them for herself-
so the wind coughed them into the grass for her to gather again.

I gather most nights up like the perfumed scabs of roses.
I used to think I only made collages on Sunday nights-- I am 
a collection of Sunday nights and the sublime stupor of magazine
article titles that I don't read because the headline is always
better than the book-- tattoo my spine with call numbers.

I make collages because I'd rather be the artist of my own recovery
than the approximation of someone else's. I'm not a sculpture. I'm 
not a work of art. I'm the third grade Elmer's gilded compiling
of breaths of god and places other humans have bled out my sides
-or places I've made my own flower crowns of thorn. 

I am not the only anthology of broken beautiful pieces.
If you ever thought that one of use was ever whole- you 
were standing too far back-- look into the 'o' of my
Open eyes and see the 'o' of obituaries- we were all born
like the throwing of an antique vase onto the red-tile floor.

mosaic memories. juggernaut galleries. broken and unbroken 
parts of a whole.