Young Writers Society

0.

I tried to talk in flowers to blend in
with the people who were themselves.

There were numbers on the wall,
so many numbers.

Underneath the exit sign there were
crushed dandelions.

I.

The thing they said at reception was
mellifluous, reeking of garden soil
and fence posts.

They said they received the 'all'
and the 'selves'.

That there were flowers that weren't recognised
for having crooked petals, or crooks in the folds
of their mint green sepals.
That had to stop. This they knew.

I saw the new forms they had printed,
filled with blanks and lines but still
filled.


II.

I live in a world of not writing these things down.
My ixoras could be roses, or more fancifully, buttercups.
I removed the printer from my house
many years ago.

Because
is it a wildflower if it is still worried
about artifices like paper and pen?
about how it looks in a portrait,
if Emily Dickinson was holding a heart's ease
or . . .

Maybe, maybe. The numbers show it matters,
the frequency of images, of wildflower picking.
Choose us, choose us, they cry.

But as for me, I
am forgetting the act of choosing and not choosing.
Forgetting the forms.
Forgetting the motions, at least
implicitly.
Perhaps you should, as well.
I will wait until you do,
even if it takes imagining impossibilities,
thinking in petals that are cubic,
stems that are soundwaves,
and all of these
ambiguous things.

-

Author's questions:

1.) Why do you think I use so much flower imagery and how do I use it?

2.) Do you sympathise or empathise with the speaker? If yes/no, why?

3.) Does the irregular line length and rhythm help or harm the poem?