i.
The flowers are not welcome.
They are tuneless and crass, a greasy regiment
Of soil-fed priests cutting deals with vagrants
In their subterranean Duchy of undying Narcissi
And blood-metal towers.
They are headaches;
Tiny robots of precision,
Tiny robots of precision,
Their sharp anvil teeth relentlessly grinding sun as sky-shy
Invertebrates bathe indecently in the thick oil
Of their ancestors
Coagulating clot-like in the straw-drawn rivers
Snaking around this Demi-kingdom of half-dead cigarette butts.
(I will not read the suicide notes they leave on the snowy cobbles,
I will not.)
ii.
They are of the Oldworld, prejudiced by their pedigree
And disfigured by their resolute nihilism. They care not for sentiment
Or blithe being, yet they are ubiquitous!
A rotating sorority of predatory nurses cloaked in the
Redundant asymmetry of their own spoon-fed asexuality.
(They ate all of the pigeons... they won’t come back.)
They have split my garden,
Ripped it blindly into a colour-coded
Ripped it blindly into a colour-coded
Regime of repetition, the leafy giants lassoing bees
Like furry humming balloons as laboured ants are held to order
Along the cracked checkpoints of inertia.
They are everywhere: a shoal of anaemic anaesthetists
Rooted in the waters of my subdued cognition,
But I will not join them!
iii.
I will not be that flower!
That sickle-spined orphan of communism,
Shuffling heavy-leafed
Into a personal apocalypse of howling morality.
I will not be that flower,
That rip-roaring shadow of light-stem
And endless eyes,
But I’d be the happiest prisoner...
Swapping spit with Moscow as Father rapes the winterlands
And the neighbours’ kids clap like geese
With fat livers.
Yes, I’d be the most obliging prisoner,
A downtrodden god with a dirty face
Knee-deep in reality and awash with the stains
Of a pre-war dystopia.
Oh, I’d be the most forgiving prisoner,
Breaking my wrists at the Altar of Weeds and
Content to accept the inevitable singularity
Of existence,
Of existence,
But I will not be that flower.
I will not.
I will not!
