It’s out there looking at me, waiting for me, but I can’t go in — I cannot bear to walk the walkways pocked with grasses,  the beds of neglect now a party of weeds. The veggies anemic, still alive but pathetic,  once so hopeful and now a sorry lament on a shriveled vine. 

The Beetles of Japan have orgied themselves, while gorging, in an iridescent sex-food holocaust that has left only laces where there should be leaves.   Their numbers are so vast there is nothing to be done - pick them, drown them,  bag in them in rotting sacs that reek like corpse.  They ate the garden again, and so did the slugs, it is wartime in the dream of eden. 

Sunflowers hang their heavy, conquered heads and the weeds are riot of seed. To beat back the forces of growth with blade and hand is the aggressive, energized stroke of spring,  a killing stroke of enduring grind that builds with the heat and mounts like a chariot of Helios oppression in the Late Summer reckoning.  

You turned your back for weeks too long and the elements of consumption,  of a million tiny toothed mouths and a zillion sucking roots, have won.

 It’s yours, you mother fuckers, you can have it, live on all you want ‘till the hard frost cuts you down in the night and tinkles as you brown and wither in an instant. I’ll stand tall in the cold, gaining strength in the snap and chill,  while all you weeds and flying, sliming destroyers shrivel up and die.  

Sure, I know your future generations are living right under my feet as grubs and insidious seed.

But just you wait ‘till next spring, I’m going to rip your world apart, dig double deep beds,  ride up with a truckload of straw to lay down in mile high drifts, I’ll starve you of light and choke you with darkness, next summer, this garden will win.