Flowers That Wilted

---

---

Whether an urn or a basket
Or a bucket or a vase,
I wanted a container
To put my heart in.

A pickle jar or the musty warm
Glove compartment on an old car,
Or the center of a big hole
Dug with a shovel of
Teeth and elbow
Grease.

---

---

I sidled up a wall
To brace my aching back
Against the dull strain inflicted by
Senseless ways of doing things that were
Engrained into me over the sandy centuries,
Centuries that wept me out in streaks of muddied paint.

Bloodied black paint that was
Glad to adorn the eager skeletons,
The skeletons that sagged old skin,
The old skin that was brittle to my touch,
My touch of lightning poison, the poison touch I
Drank when I couldn’t afford to laugh or cry or pine or
Sigh into hands callused by attitudes that blistered my chest.

---

---

I hoarded that chest, the wooden one that burned;
I filled it up with secrets, made it go invisible with the shame
That scalded behind my cattle ears and my smoke fingers that
Swelled and burst like overripe fruits in brackish culmination.

I watched it decay in the yellow fire that ate at paper-edged
Memories, memories that boiled out of a glossy urn,
An urn that rolled out of the basket ashes,
Ashes spilled out of a rusted bucket
That was filled with the grotesque
Fragments of a frescoed vase
That held the charred seeds
Of flowers that wilted
When they were
Plucked from
Within me.

---

---

Written by Daniel Pendergraft
7/20/17

All images are free domain use

---

---