chipped plates

i do not want to be a more careful person.
in the house with only one window
i kept just a single plate. it was plastic 
& i yearned to break it. once in that lonely
hallway. i dropped a drinking glass 
& spent the next week plucking the slivers 
from the hardwood floor. if i was more careful
i would not have become as intimate 
with the baseboard or the halos. as a child 
i was a fracture expert. i broke wine glasses
& the big clumsy dinner plates. in our yard
we have a graveyard where i take the shards.
press them into the earth. sometimes they grow
trees of cups & spoons. in the autumn they ripen
& smash on the ground. there are people
who walk around without breaking anything.
i am the china shop inside the bull. the impending 
broken tooth. i am not wholly against kintsugi
but it it does not come naturally to me.
i smash houses. i smash years. once i broke
a whole city. i'm embarassed at just
how comfortable i am with my own faults.
i think, "yes, of course the floor is covered
in glass" & "yes of course the smoke alarm
is singing from a hymnal." my favorite plates
are the ones with chips in them. survivors
of a fall. places where an angel has feasted 
on the ceramic or the percaline or the glass
or the clay. i find marks on myself like that.
my father tells a story where i was dropped
from the roof of the house as a baby & somehow
did not shatter. there is a chip on my back 
to prove it. sometimes though i search 
for that piece. wonder what it would mean 
to place it back on the third step of my spine. 
is there a point when can just decide i am whole?
not because of the absence but in spite of it?