My life is so chaotic right now that I welcome the cliché of fully bloomed roses. I take in each one as I sit on the steps of a brick waterfall. The shadows of a small exotic tree intersect with mine own and I’m ok with that as well. My muse is the same muse of many thousand other writers and that’s alright too. My mind lifted a few moments ago. It was racing down the runway at a very high-speed and then it got off the ground. It isn’t flying yet but for a very quick moment it was in the air.
Fall is upon us and the roses are still quite lovely. Even the dying roses possess a striking regality. People still smell them, the honeybees patronize them, and they provide the perfect contrast for their resilient freshly bloomed relatives. While here amongst the roses in Piedmont, a town that a person as dark as myself is welcome to visit but is strongly discouraged from buying property in, I almost forgot about what brought me here in the first place.
In the ghetto from whence I come from people tend to die several years before their actual death and not a living thing around them actually cares. No one values the life of the man himself, no one stops to admire the drug-addicted woman who has stolen from her mother to get high. In the ghetto a person enjoys no serenity in the presence of the dead. So I have temporarily escaped my circumstance to be amongst these flowers—these petaled things that I only find to be pretty because a dozen poets told me they were. I have come to these stairs to sit down because I have grown weary of standing and fighting. The romantics created an image that I believe is real. Even when I can’t see it I still believe it. I believe that flowers are more perfect than people could ever be and then I ponder whether or not William Wordsworth would shake my hand. Would Mary Shelley give me a hug, would Blake? Do they know that I’m here? Do they care?
-YB