Fuck Up

Make a delicious mistake. Fuck up once in a while.
After all, I invented peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
when I was 4 years old, stealing and smashing
two jars from mommy's grocery bag, sticking my hands
in the mess, then in my mouth, wiping the glisten
of chunky brown and crimson from my cheeks
with soft white Wonder Bread. Yes I did.

When I was 7 I invented the frisbee
while throwing a plateful of broccoli
my babysitter forced me to eat out the window.
I did. And I invented S'mores at the age of 12
when a pimply camp counselor wouldn’t let me have
three desserts: so I crushed them into one.
Don’t you love people who crush things into one?
And burn the marsh mallow?

Even in the uterus my great aunt Molly, who lived
in a previous century, made me wear red rubber
rain boots, scrawling L and R on them, like left
and right would matter in the 8-shaped breath
of my infinite womb-swimming, which made me
so angry my subatomic bones would rattle the stars.
Yes, I was a mad and powerful embryo.

What did you invent by smearing, by smashing,
by your glorious lack of impulse control
in the sacred mayhem of childhood?
Go ahead, tell me everything. Or tell
an exquisite lie so outrageous it might be true:

"I invented the way light shatters in the prism
of a dewdrop by powers of ten, creating
the first rainbow." Or, "I was a wanderer,
hitchhiking before I could walk." Or maybe,
"My past sins cancelled all my works of mercy;
negative and positive collided in my heart,
adding up to nothing, no karma at all, which is why,
at birth, my fetus crowned through Zero."

Makes perfect sense to me, Friend. Now listen:
Whoever God is, She embraces this mess.
Squirting our mouths with milky streams of Life,
Life in abundance, She overbrims our grail with
Second Chances, permitting the Impeccable Blunder.

From the uncertain locus of an electron
to mutations in a molecule of cytosine,
right up the crazy chain of non-causality
to how black chaos engenders stars
in the belly button of a supernova,
all of us are mistakes of necessity, even Jesus,
hairline fractures in the magnanimous vacuum,
filled in with molten gold, kintsugi of the human. 

So if you never got sentenced to time-out chair
in kindergarten, or sent to the principle's office
for pulling someone’s pony tail in grade school;
if you never cut class to explore the wilderness
in your soul, or skipped church to attend
the carnival in your body; if you never got
tear-gassed by cops on the street in college;

never got fired, never spent a single night in jail;
and never found your body in a hot mess
on the kitchen floor, your fingernails engraving
hieroglyphs of grief in the linoleum - dear one,
you may not actually have been alive.