“Beauty Needs To Go To Therapy” by Stevie Mitchell
Beauty has lived as a drunk.
An alcoholic wino sipping the pleasure away from one person
while relieving herself of it on top of another.
Beauty has been a bully that recruits minds to hurt what looks back at us in the mirror, never realizing that it’s not just the mirror that has the ability to break.
Beauty has been at war, using battle blood as foundation, and nasty looks at strangers as weapons to protect an image and idea the world is tired of.
Beauty spent her weekends drowning herself in everyone’s local river
before crawling back in bed with us all. Beauty became cold and wet just to take our heat.
And we comforted beauty like she was a weak child, asking for milk, asking for love.
I know I’ve spent many nights holding this child in my arms rocking it asleep
to find it gone in the morning, taking all of my love for each individually painted face that walks upon the worlds runway.
But now, Beauty needs a new job.
She needs to study tile floors of Mexican church yards
and learn to laugh at her own jokes.
Beauty needs to walk barefoot on cobble stone roads,
that lead to new places,
and towards new people who have never heard her mother tongue.
Beauty needs to take the time to plant a garden.
Growing wild flowers that don’t bloom until the following year.
Wonder what she did wrong.
‘Did I over or under water?…’
Beauty needs to touchup her lipstick shes been wearing for years
By kissing strangers that have given you the look of adventure from across the bar.
The color of fear is beginning to wear thin in this new beam of starlight.
Beauty needs to read a poem.
She needs to learn to love the shape of uneven verses and odd numbered sonnets.
Beauty needs to pour her heart out on a page and write something that might come across as just ugly, and be okay with it.
Beauty needs to rest.
Beauty needs time to sleep again.
Beauty needs silence so that when she wakes, her song is stronger than what we have heard in the past.
And in doing so, maybe beauty will come to see that she doesn’t actually need to exist within any of these things.
That she can just be.
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