Poem - Carnations
Carnations in the middle of a field. I’m having a day off or twenty - make it a year.
Ruffling leaves in the wind, or is it silence? Between the bushes or in the open? I’ve never seen them in the wild - they’re too tame for me.
Domesticated - so easily acquired - accessible for everyone on the street screaming ‘I want you!’
(Do you? Do you really? With all their folds and unpredictable colour changes - the way they need oxygen-infused water and constant enrichment to not let their heads hang? They die fast - do you know that when you buy them cut down - mutilated like animal parts that you eat fabricated into a sausage under the false premise of bio-organic-awareness hidden inside a cornershop where you buy mushrooms that you don’t tell your wife about - ?
Bought like everything else - consumed like everything else - desensitised of the fact that each petal of the flowers you throw away is the result of a cascade of impossibilities randomly aligned in transcended inheritance.)
I should be glad. Should be thankful. Should congratulate you. Picking out the slaughterhouse specialists for your own incredibly limited, intolerably influenced standard of beauty, class and poise. You’re a masterpiece.
- they’re blue, artistically common - dry to a faded cobalt. Thin in stem and petals - irresistibly unstable. they die. In the span of a day. They die to a million shattered pieces of crystal clear ash. They crumble down into oblivion. You can’t take them home - neither can you grow them there. They don’t belong to you, they can’t bear your touch. Only a look settles the verdict. The most beautiful to ever exist - plenty in numbers- yet impossible to tame. They’d rather die than be owned.
You will have to stick to your pretty flowers with a short-term - but considerably endless - expiration date. The complicated patterns and robust petals (that you don’t understand, and never will) Settle for the ordinary - the socially acceptable gorgeous - red, white, yellow, green, pink and blue - but never as blue as the ones in the wild - the ones that refuse your touch - the ones that can be considered pretty but never held as an option to be brought home. You wouldn’t succeed if you’d try. Many before you failed - I failed.
You look for Carnations though - for faded pink and gloomy violet - you look at the places you’re supposed to - blind everywhere you go. You don’t marvel, you don’t linger - you don’t breathe - don’t exist.
Here in the open, the fields of green, situated on the ground, with eyes wide to preserve the memory into unfading fragments of soulful reminders - puzzle pieces on a wall - the hunt of a criminal documented in red yarn - blue hues of cornflowers decay in the sunlight of another dying day - impulses uncaught. Forgettable and unforeseen.
You at the flowershop - me with my fingers covered in blue ash - you should have never tried to take me home.