I avoid writing poems about flowers
I don’t need to tell you that roses
Bright, blood red, placed perfectly atop a broccoli-green vine,
Existing solely for the purpose of atheistic pleasure
Is something that is beautiful
Put a white background behind anything and it becomes beautiful
Flowers are more than a hyped-up beauty pageant queen that those old white women grow to fill their voids with
They sometimes manage to grow in my neighborhood too
Once prominent Victorian homes now squalid and neglected
Weathered wood, dirt embedded in the sea-foam green, navy blue, eggshell white paint they were once coated with
Trash thrown in front of their faces
Like their appalling forms granted validity for those who passed by to toss their gum wrappers, soda cans, and cigarettes without hesitation
It’s an age-old tale
Ugly things deserve ugly treatment
I’ll always spot a savage grove of mutt flowers
Amongst the trash cans and recycle bins
Struggling to make their way to the surface of these rejected homes
Acknowledging them, coddling them, interweaving themselves along their battered walls
Ignorant to their repugnancy
Eager to decorate and give them an evanescent glow
Sad too,
Sad they didn’t grow in front of some rich family’s home
Where they would’ve been given weekly haircuts and fertilizer containing only the best **** on the market
They wilt a little
They have no direction,
No will to live or to die
They exist and sit there until a bike runs them over
And takes them out in one swoop
Or until those stray dogs **** and **** on them until their weak
Frames fall staunchly onto the grave sidewalk
Exquisite wild lepers,
You do more for society than I ever could
You’ll sit there with a dutiful posture
Harboring old McDonald French Fry boxes
Eating the sewer-infested dirt that you laboriously grew from
Constantly breathing air swarmed with smog
Beautiful because,
Despite it all,
You don’t hate them
You’ll peek at me through your prison of trash and give me a flash of your purple and blue skin
And
My eyes feel your love and serenity
And for a moment,
The world is nothing but a kaleidoscope of warm skin and heartbeats