Those God'damn Tulips

by Courtney Foth

I’m done with

every pretty thing. 

A caster’s glitter pink noose round my neck, let it drop,

and plunge another ring through my nose. I want

a flower’s outwardness, no, its stem. All the sticky prickles

I’m loose, and alive to what I like, bruised apples and blank

boxes, trashy love

This horny skin beckons; yes, I’m the frog’s first.

My button-eyed, goat-backed, meat-faced, slaver-lipped,

Prehensile, irrelevant virgin. You’re dry—eat some sin,

it’s good for that.

Fuck, I need another needle. 

let me drown, then feed me, then stretch my skin until pretty again

            yeah right? The edges eat me just the same

Only the desperate really survive, good thing that, I’d be just another

dirty rock. Idiotic, you’d think, to clean a rock—don’t try it.

I can’t laugh.  

I’ll joke with the dead. They’ll share my eyes: no more tulips,

no more stupid dreams, no more slant hopes. Just straw for fire,                           intentional curses, and lavender

Decrees are final when they’re made with worms.

Fingers squirm like them, and wriggle impatience, let me be

let me be without your beauty. I don’t need it, pretty, what?

Lipping a stone, and calling it a rose; how dumb, it’s a god’damn stone

You summer stallions with soft honey hair, run away.

There is nothing here for you, for me.                  

I would be out: you want me in…

            well, stick it.

This is a found poem based from Straw For The Fire, a string of poems from the notebooks of Theordore Roethke.