Gardening 101

you have flowers that
bloom abundantly
from your mouth
but mine won’t grow there

they get pulled out or stomped on
until i’m left with nothing except
the broken petals
the useless leaves
thorns caught between my teeth

i try to water them every day but
the dirt under my tongue
just turns into mud
i swallow it and wish
i didn’t have to

but that same dirt
clings to my hands
where weeds sprout
from the cracks
in my fingers

i try to arrange them
as best i can
but a weed is still a weed
and your flowers
are still blooming

i give them to you anyway
knowing you’ll do whatever
you want with them
love them
or destroy them

i take a deep breath
and i wash my hands

---

I didn’t plan on my first post to be a poem. I haven’t written poetry in years, and certainly not regularly since high school, but I probably spent more time on this one than any poem I’ve ever written. I hope it makes sense to people who aren’t me, but if it doesn’t, I’m okay with that.

it’s almost hard to believe he lost.

I’m not entirely sure yet what I want to get out of this blog. Well, I kinda do. I mostly just wanted a space I could express myself in long-form. Twitter gets kind of cramped sometimes.

So I felt that a quote from Sports Night, one of my favorite shows, was appropriate. What was Napoleon’s Battle Plan? “First, we show up, then we see what happens.”

Whether that’s historically accurate or not, I don’t know. But it amuses me all the same, and it’s basically the same attitude with which I’m approaching this blog. Could be funny, could be sad, could be thinky, could be weird.

We’ll see what happens.