43/100

Of cactus and orchids and everything in between

In a rawness I can never seem to place in the moment

Where I persist in a way beyond commiseration

There lives so much blasé hatred

As they sit potted in quart containers

That I stole from work.

Meanwhile at Pershing square

The Datura pulls over agave in aligned rows

Behind fencing

On a walkway where everything always smells like piss.

Like a crowdsurfer through thorns

Throwing up white flags

unstoppably insurgent

with a smell that has the power to recall memories
of distant places, vastly unlike here.   

They sit in square boxes

Atop a Beverly Hills apartment

Awaiting my return

The one; never stops flowering.

The other; never gives up.

The rest, a hodgepodge

Emaciated when I found them

Entrenched in their fallen

Persistent to the last

and on this seething day

when the soft and distracted cannot muster the strength

my bag with quart containers of avocado stones

my skin soaks up all the water of my peeling tattoos

in a feeling not so unlike shedding weakness

with a cold rush to the head,

not so unlike awakening

to the reality that we seem to have no control over.  

with a kind of connection that seems to have no bearing.

delicately caught in the distant closeness of the green