Unless by Nara

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I’m not doing flowery today, I can’t.
Unless it’s one with thorns. Unless it’s one with distorted, mottled blossoms, with veins popping and centers bulging. Unless those thorny, ugly blossoms are on twisted branches, suffocating the sun for anything that grows below. Unless those branches, with their wide reach, grow from a trunk leaking bloody sap. Unless the gnarled roots of that twisted, greedy, repulsive tree are burrowed into black bodies, those bodies becoming the soil, becoming the nourishment, becoming the very foundation the tree needs in order to stand.

I’m not doing flowery today.

Unless it’s referring to the toxic pollen of putrid blooms. Spreading on airwaves, fertilizing with acid rain. Sinking into the cores of waiting blossoms, receptors bent to follow their sun.

I’m not doing flowery today.

But maybe a fungus or a vine. One that creeps above the surface, or just below, only seen if you know where to look. One that demolishes with ravenous hunger, anything of goodness along the way. One that strangles and covers and climbs. One that wriggles into cracks and crevices, tendrils securing its grip, only to stretch further. A poisonous fungus, a poisonous vine, leaving corrosive residue behind. Tainted tongues and rabid minds the proof of its existence.

I’m not doing flowery today, unless it’s the kind that needs to be chopped down, ripped out, dug up and burned at the root.

I’m not doing flowery today.