Flora and the Blade

How much of a chance do I really have?

Those moments of civilized privacy–showering, using the toilet–seem savage and volatile. I trace the ghosts of scars, long faded, hoping to feel them raise beneath my fingers and prove that they once were–that they are–real.

The solitary scar that remains feels like a trap of guerilla warfare, as if one hand may run its stunted length as the other carves its offspring into healed yet still mutilated flesh.

I work with flowers now. Though comforting and innocent, I still find myself drawn to whites and blood-reds, as if maybe the colors will bleed into one another.

The flora is comforting, as is the practice, taking beauty and shaping it into still-more beautiful sculpture f patient hand and artistic eye.

It can be challenging, attempting to grip satin ribbon as it takes shape into its own sort of bloom, only to crumple into heaps of shiny lint.

However frustrating, one must finish what one has started, and the sculputre is not complete without its embellishments.

Sometimes, the attempts are countless. But when one builds something of true beauty, no matter how humble, little can be said of negative stature.

It is hard to believe hands capable of such destruction are also capable of such art.