The Secret Garden.

There’s a sweet spot, under the Apple tree, in this, my garden of unpredictability.

Gravity’s a well, a curse, this spot in the crook of my elbow where sensations are locked in sunlight, rapt in a dominant chord – the sacred music of slow death and things picking up at the end of this little path.

C’est toi, mon Père – a weed, wrapped about my ankles.
My lead pear, holding a pair of shears to box my ears and drown me in your tart dismay.

You know, my wild imagination has grown too tall for the stone wall around this place.
I premiere new balance each Spring but there are too many secrets half-undone,
and we forget.

So soon the sunflowers bloom,
before you’d had the chance to pluck yet another bud of mine.

I grew up here, fearing the butterflies you’d catch
because they run the world, you know?
One beats at the breeze and a wave swallows a distant shore.

If only I had wings.

But so far so good, no casualties in this,
my secret garden.

Except you, my Tin Man.

You’re a lonely iris in a field of my poppies.

Immortal, dark silence, I bury myself in you -
A glue for temperate measures, for summer’s evensong
that goes on in my heart. A little jump-start before the Fall.

This is a place of serenity, close to divinity
but never nearer than Her silver painted toes.
I’m not much more than a number, a china doll with an unlit cigarette in between her lips.

I pretend to have Her ear because it’s all that gets me past the memory
of your hands digging into dirt and dust, by unjust moonlight.

Against the memory of violence there is little more than the certainty that from these seeds something free and strong may grow. Something along the lines of another me, with much to be that isn’t made from leftover desire and unwanted sorrow.

This is a place for all things to grow, even melancholy and madness,
for they have their seasons too, you know?