don’t tell flowers

you love them.

wilting daffodils will cry,

sunbaked tulips turn their gaze,

and beneath the pinkened sky chrysanthemums

hide shame in yellowing beds of weeds.

in the new age your bursting fingers fiddle helplessly with a broken plug.

you’re all swollen tongue and swollen heart and swollen organs in a big bag of bones.

no one has loved you since, and repeatedly in three years of foreign language,

we remind ourselves of our broken mind, broken body, broken roots,

an oak tree that has been standing for too many years and is rotting at its core,

all its rings eaten up by termites.

loathe love, hold onto your bitterness, you’re starbucks hot chocolate.