the flowers


the flowers i gave you wilted on your porch while you drank your 7am coffee

while you typed emails to your brother about this article you read on gawker

while you sucked the last bit of chicken soup you made last night out of a green ceramic bowl

while you held onto the back of the chair you sat on, and twisted your torso so that every notch in your spine made a loud popping noise

while you rubbed the dry skin on the bottom of your elbow and wondered if you should buy that moisturizer somebody told you about


the flowers i gave you wilted on your porch while you watched the bus you were supposed to catch drive past you indifferently

while the bus driver thought about his ex wife in the yukon taking stool samples from endangered bison

while the bison licked the frozen sap off a leafless tree

while your mother ran herself a hot bath and rubbed lavender oil on her legs

while your father watched women’s tennis in his basement on his flat screen tv


the flowers i gave to you wilted while i fucked my art history professor in the back of his navy blue honda civic

while my jeans stopped fitting like they used to because i’ve been eating a lot of baked goods and drinking a lot of iced coffee

while you imagine me sitting in your living room, wearing your t shirt, reading the book by charles de lint that you got me for christmas

while your girlfriend comes over and cooks steak and potatoes and watches the real housewives of atlanta

while you open and close gchat conversations from 2 years ago and adjust your testicles


while the spider living in the corner of your top left bedpost gives birth to 100,000,000 spider babies

while the spider babies crawl into your mouth as you sleep

while they crawl through your stomach and intestines and out of your asshole and onto the floor and through the kitchen and out the door

while they crawl up the wall into the planter where

the flowers i gave you wilted on your porch