On being a gardener

when you work in these gardens you pull out these weeds, if your not sure if its a weed you go away from the garden and look in the woods to see if you can see the same plant, if you see one like it then its a weed and you pull it out, and you dump it over the hill or the ledge, the dumping ground

when you come into a town what’s the first thing you see?

A wooden sign with the name of the town on it. what’s all around the sign? Plants. That’s what. But in these gardens you pull out the horsetail for your skeletal system and the coal we still burn. You pull out the Mugwort for your magic and your bad breath and your lack of being able to discern the veil that is waiting to be unfolded by you, you pull that plant out. The little green plants like Chickweed that people curse and that can sooth your throat, maybe cool you down a bit, make you ponder. But around the signs to the towns these plants are’t allowed to be, even the Mullein, majestic and erect for you to have a backbone and to get rid of that earache to illuminate the day with the most sublime shade of yellow Once used to burn the midnight oil and allow us to see, these torches with their surprisingly shallow roots, even she is pulled and cast aside and thrown in the ditch. We don’t want to be the true better versions of ourselves because it is so hard, so hard to not be human, to be whatever you choose to be as a protector of the promise. The promise of glory. Of being a carrier of the truth Free for the planting, of letting the field go, a pollinators paradise with no effort. This does not require a budget but it requires you to know the name of the real medicine. The plants planted bought from the store are showy and effusive and striking, they come back, they last in the shade, they cost money, they are grown somewhere else, they come in plastic are paid for with plastic and they make me feel empty. The gardeners who don’t know the names of the first plants, which have lent their genetics to be sculpted into other versions of themselves, more classy, like they’ve been somewhere, seen somethings, not like the weeds that stay in the background, pulling the cadmium from your gutters, filtering the dirty runoff and catching enough of the silt to begin another planet. Im not sure what I’m getting at, there all beautiful the plants, just how they are segregated and edited in or out of the picture seems ridiculous, but i admit it. they look nice sometimes, the signs with the nice flowers around them,, just need to weedwack all those weeds, they don’t belong there, because we didn’t put them there.

but I’m not ready for the spiritual overpass coming up on the left, not ready to roll up the sleeve and take one on the chin for the team, not ready to keep conniving deeper into this fucked up racket that we are all playing. Its a racket and a con and a lie and you know it but you go ahead and do it because you want to go away and see yourself in a different place away from those stairs you have to clean to get to your room, the toilet where you sit and sometimes break down in the dark knowing this is it, its real and you don’t get to walk out there head held high until you can look yourself in some reflection, some mirror and smile and like what you see. Im not ready to run, but I’m ready to get into a another way of doing things, of another world. i want to go over there and you can’t stop me, your shiny bling and gold badge is no longer a welcome sight or even appropriate attire, it is of the old world. were going to just walk where we need to go, with whatever we need in our packs, stuffed into out chosen mode of transport, basic or opulent, if you’re lucky you have the choice, but they will both get us there, to the jungle, to the sea, to the next village, the next dream reenactment without all these bad ACTORS in suits and ties and stiff collars and pointy shoes and waving from the tarmac and shaking hands on the podium. They don’t have to be in our new paradigm. an analogue for them does not exist in the new world, for lack of a better term, for it is a new world but parallel and visible to the old but untouchable, unfuckwithable. A new word. Our stories cannot be propaganda but truth.