She started with the dirt.

and so it began:
salty dreams dripped like rain water from her heart,
sounding like bass drum parade when
they bombarded  
the seeds below.
Boom, bang.

and her symphony began.

Her eyes only rested softly on the peach petals and
green she wished to see one day,
trying to line them up in her mind.
Finding order in the colorful plumage
one could grow and

Row by row
She began to sow
Her own
beauty.

Every day spent, relentlessly push-pulling
with the thorned roses and monsooning
for her scars. She’d bind their branches and with scarlet
fingers, she’d bless each white petal she found
with blood across his white flesh,
so that he too, would not be taken for some
innocent fool, so easy to
pluck apart.

She lived this way for many years,
routinely carving out her heart for the
flowers in her garden.

for this notion
of keeping something pure

in a world so filthy that the only
place a flower has to grow is
in the mud and
the only way a flower is supposed to be able to grow pretty
is with“Fertilizer”.
Then one day,
she finally realized that all fertilizer is,
is ****.

That very night she built herself a greenhouse
with her bed at the very center of the garden
and she threw out all the fertilizer
she’d bought at Lowe’s on sale earlier that week. She began to
practice sleeping with her thoughts and her cultivation,
the smell of fresh mud and potpourri
tormented each other the minute her head hit
her grassy green pillow and she would let her garden fester,
foliage bounded by her fear.

Once her fingers began to wrinkle and her voice no longer
bounced back at her from her fortified walls,

she found herself

tangled in the freely flowing vines she had once
kempt so well. The peach petals and green
made her heart squeeze as they grew lovingly,
between her toes
to her chest
and around her neck.

As she dreamt, they did not suffocate her
like she believed they would, one day long ago. The
dirt felt water-like beneath her back, soothing her bedsores and
sounding of the bass-drum parade from many years ago,
when she listened closely. Her eyes fluttered with
every bang and she found her peach petals again-

all so chaotically contained, their colors
stifled by the jagged walls she built for herself.

Taking in their unique passions and thorns
in one steady breath, rainwater fell for her
flowers softly this time. With every drip-drop,
each rose played his own sweet note.
Triangles and marimbas and strings
serenading her into bliss.

We can only dream that she found beauty
in her cultivations, just as they
found
in her.