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