Poem
You call yourself a landscape artist
but in fact you cultivate cannabis
on the roof of your shoddy apartment
on which it is raining more often than not.
There was a time when you called me
wordsmith, silver-tongued. The people
in the world whom you envy mostly grew up
in rural Pennsylvania, not the Amish
but something close. How have you come
to envy yourself? Over the phone
you used the phrase, “When we
were growing up.” Did you wear braces
when you were growing up, the dentist asks.
I suspect that your classmate hung himself
because he was afraid of one day dying.
Does the cannabis keep you going
when the green landscape is flooded
with grey, more often than not?
