SPARK

Amy L. Alley
Methods
Response

Accessing Social Desperation: Here, We Bloom*
By KJ Hannah Greenberg
Inspiration piece

A rose reaches, buds, blooms, dries. Anhingas, too, hatch, grow, fledge.

Still, as concerns humanity, wild flowers, waterfalls, birds, gazelles, all

Comprise only brittle dreams, flimsy hopes, inspirations quelled. Today,

Scant sympathetic reservoirs remain opposed to individual, cerebral infidelities.

While fragrant blossoms’ beauty goes unobserved and avian splendor fails assessments,

We press on sufficient assemblages of midlevel clerks to insure our generation’s railing

Against morality’s supposed’ trammels, toward extending questionable dispositions,

The sorts of which readily skulk toward disposed forbearance. In brief, we’re sunk.

As sentinels, we allowed unaccounted for capexes, unreified assets, collective merit

Measured solely in pretty girls’ hot soaks, fluffy pillows’ feathers, moneyed academies,

Sustenances so delicious that even the most soaring among us felt compelled to return

For seconds, to beg additional servings of tending, to sup again in half hour intervals.

Considering our communal predilection toward glorifying “more,” toward espousing

That mankind ought to emulate country folk, out from under whom many farms got sold,

We’re in trouble. Forget that big boys burst with laughing, that taskmasters bloom smiles

For the benignly neglected. If ousted from extensive relationships, pretties salve no hurt.

It’s vital we commit that taxane-type meds don’t insure renewed ecological participation.

Likewise, the media’s most exquisite, glossiest coat of guarantees won’t bring dinner;

The plated morsels are dead, or are obsessed with emulating latter day sins’ second failings.

Verity established tomorrow’s chow as everyone’s responsibility, heritage seeds notwithstanding.

Until such time as unmitigated actions prove luxuries among kumquats, interpersonal campaigns Will breathe specters among the dating scene, will continue to exist as the worst affective flares

Tormenting the observably heart wrenched of hedgehogs, donkeys, peacocks, spinsters, stags,

Living companionless, uncoupled, alone in seeking a puddle of understanding, a square of sun.

*Henry David Thoreau wrote, in “Sic Vita,” “And here I bloom for a short hour unseen.”

Art created in response to Poem!