The dandelion and the orchid... 1. I am a dandelion. Damned weed! My beauty is ordinary, ubiquitous, undesired. I thrive on busy roadsides, around and between vacant lot rubble, in broken back sidewalk cracks. I am squeezed into wine where thin skinned grapes fail. I am a child's toy, wishes cast on feathery seed and sown on the wind. I am playful sibling denial and decapitation, Momma had a baby and its head popped off. I am bitter greens, butter, vinegar, mustard on plates of poverty and immigration. I am an annoyance in proper places attacked with spinning blades, poison, spades and bare ripping fists. 2. You are an orchid. Your beauty is exotic, rare and treasured. You are seized from wild palaces, fens of isolation. You are cultivated, propagated by caring hands beneath conservatory glass. You incite mania, desperation, moral transgressions, murder. You intoxicate without yeast and sugar. You will never join with common vinegar or worn fork. You are a delicate, singular specie. 3. The floral beauty and the tenacious weedy beast. O impossible cross pollination! O the onerous, resilient, odd children! Might not the world destroy them with boot heels of marketing, automatic silk and plastic consumerism? My vacant lots have already succumbed to vinyl condominiums. The weekly poison dose is taking hold. While your palatial fens fall to saws held, smoking, screaming lumber, soy and beef. Where is our exile? Flowers do not find root in lunar craters. We'll have to resort to barricades. Board the windows and doors with love and poetry. We'll die with melting, empty rifles and fists. We'll be despised and wildly admired. We'll be dead winter flowers unaffected by the new Spring. We'll be dead, dragged to curbs readied for rough, unknowing hands. We’ll be dead. 4. The dead man said, "The day started out... with normal showers, and cobwebs of sleep."