Cactus Plant

(Note: This was written one night, (October 6th to be excact) after biking home to pick up the car on the way from one social function to another. The images had been in my head for a while, but suddenly they became a poem of sorts. I sat down immediatly upon getting home and wrote it out freehand. The very next day, I read it at an open mic poetry night. I'm not a poet, I'm a playwrite, and perhaps it shows, but I do like this poem. Please excuse the formatting, but, you know, it's one of those things.)

Cactus Plant

The day that she left me, my cactus plant died.
A round little bulb of green and thorns,
A gift, from her, a reminder of happier times-
To bring some life into this place, she said,
Something you won’t kill too easy, she smiled,
A joke. We named it ‘Harold’, our first child,
One last thing she took with her when she went.

I know it died because I had had one other, years ago,
Another gift, a cheap present, 3.98$ plus tax at some chain store, somewhere,
From a friend who wasn’t one long and wasn’t missed after.
This one was spherical and seemed to wish to burst
from the coffee tin in which it had been planted.
Its soft sharp curves seemed optimistic-
Like the bright flowers it bloomed in the first month,
Only to wilt and fall and then, never again.
I neglected it, and yet it still was green. I took a perverse pride:
First “It’s been weeks since I-“ and then “Watered it maybe once every month or-“
and so on and so forth until:
“Is that still there? I had forgotten it.”
Maybe a year without water, and still green by some miracle.
Only when I touched it, it fell away, collapsed into itself like a deflated balloon,
An empty husk revealing itself, the plant long since dead,
maybe since the first and final time those small buds bloomed only to fall to neglect.

I knew that my second plant lived because each time I would come to it,
Placed in the tiny window of my basement room, it would lean towards the sun,
Vegetation seeking luminous salvation from my dark dwelling,
My moonless hiding place.
And so, weary of a ruse like my last cactus plant, I would turn it,
And as proof of its will to live the next time it would have moved again,
Still stretching towards the only nourishment that would see it with any regularity.

It struck me as strange that one plant should live
While the other would die and take on the illusion of life.
Were I the cactus put under such condition, which would I be?
In the end though, I supposed it doesn’t matter
As regardless of their efforts,
both died.

It struck me then that the cactus is a hardy plant,
built for survival,
one that could withstand the harsh heats and chills of the desert lands –
lonely souls battered by the extremes –
and thrive without life,
without water,
over times that were as good as endless
next to my own
human
fragility.

And yet, when she left me,

we both died.