It always starts with the  looking of  bouquets of dying flowers in the grocery store
they're always by the entrance and they're always wrapped in cellophane
Moody lilies, doe-eyed star daffodils, ******* lace-leaves
My grandfather's name was Hyacinth
It's symbolic somewhere, somehow
My family's name is buried neck deep in floral epithets
not that you would notice or care
There's an attraction to be named after beautiful things
From the side of my shoulder I hear
count your hands, they might be missing fingers
I look abrasively counting in rotund continuity
one two three four five
one two three four five
when I look behind me the speaker blasts John Mayer and I go home feeling nauseous
manic begonias, sultry sweet-tooth hydrangeas
you pick a rose and it stabs your finger so you set it on fire and take a picture of it, you call it art and the leaves wither
when I sit at my dinner table eating salmon
I cannot stop thinking about mercury poisoning
I lick the table salt off my hands
I wait for cardiac arrest but while that happens
there is that friend of a foe, that voice tickling the back of my ear with it's summer tongue
telling me, beckoning that the tap water I'm drinking is laced with LSD by the government and that I'm going to have a bad trip that I won't be able to get out of. I'll be stuck in that endless loop like a record player that keeps getting scratched by the needle and won't play anything but static noise now.
I go to bed biting my nails until they're raw and touching skin making sure that my hands are still my own
Moonflowers bloom at night and marigolds remind me of the sun
In the morning I dream of driving out to sea in a car that doesn't belong to me and wait for the coral to overtake my brain
When I wake up I do 20 laps around my house instead