"overwatering" poems
The orchid is dead.
The “just because” orchid you bought me when things first started to feel rocky
is dead.
That delicate, fragile thing.
It’s hard to say what really killed it.
It wasn’t doing well from the beginning.
Perhaps it came to me a little broken.
Perhaps it had some fatal flaw that meant it would’ve died no matter what I did.
But overwatering it certainly didn’t help.
I think I might be stuck wondering for a while,
did I **** something beautiful or did you just present me with a dying flower?
Either way,
it’s dead.
I threw it away today.
Jan 4, 2020
Jan 4, 2020 at 9:07 PM UTC
Like any kid who is lucky enough to have the world want him in it, he has been taught how to love—a seminar where his dad shows him how to strip aloe vera in two to lay it over spots the sun has shined on for too long, a whole class dedicated to how his mom keeps on telling him stories to sleep even when he’s grown enough to read on his own.
The thing is, even though he had technically attended every lesson, he’d never thought he would need to pay attention to the instructions. So when it’s his turn for show-and-tell to go up to the front of the class and demonstrate how it’s done, he loves as if he's been forced to improvise.
Scene unscripted, role unrehearsed, character unprepared, all he can think about is how she had looked the moment right before, sunburnt by his bedside lamp on the pitch black of the room to showcase smoldered pores and the limestone of her thighs, skin that stands behind the pale line telling apart the stretch of her legs that had tanned over the summer and the one not even the sun had been allowed to kiss.
You can try to keep your plants well fed and end up overwatering them. You can lay under someone else's bedroom lamp and end up bulb-burnt. You can improv love and end up with violence. The lovers always lose at love—who else could lose the game other than the players?—because if practiced love can kiII, amateur love has every chance of leaving them as dust.
And no lesson in the world could have prepared him for that—not for the violence or the dust or the peeling skin or the failed classes—but to run a hand over a place that hasn't ever been even at sun's reach, and know he's going to be stripping aloe vera to soothe the scars he'll leave for time to come, and that he'll be telling unscripted, unrehearsed stories that stretch on and on to avoid reading out their end—(that no one, not even the sun wins).
Mar 13, 2022
Mar 13, 2022 at 11:21 AM UTC
I used to have a plant that I loved.
The ones before neglected and left it
alone in the dark. At the base, there are still scars
yet I stared in awe whenever I saw it.
It had pink flowers mixed with bits of blue,
with a slim, tall, and strong frame.
The *** was white with a round bottom,
with red spots exposed by the chipped paint.
I loved it so hard because I wanted it to thrive,
but maybe I did too much. Every plant is different.
There was already yellow at the ends;
I didn’t notice the overwatering.
It hurt to see the plant go even though
I gave it love, and I thought it was enough.
May 7, 2021
May 7, 2021 at 12:12 PM UTC