Cacti

Its near-transparent needles have never given shade
You may refer to your texts and disagree politely
But that’s no leaf by any socially accepted definition
A paradox of fur, bloodthirsty, out of prehistory
Defying our explanations

These are shallow roots in shifting sands
This is a stem, fat from keeping itself close to itself
Nothing changes no matter how many references
You make to its extraordinary evolutionary adaptations
No matter how many half-rhymes I fling from my hands

When you have lost your manuals and their numbered illustrations
And I my chapbooks of verse with their stanzas cleft
When all the lovely words in our different worlds
Are no longer enough to fuel our wanton distraction
Whatever will we have left?

Here in my cramped apartment I am thinking
Of you, and all of you, much like how I’m writing
Hypocritically about the desert from a temperate land
Give me a chance, let my words be true as they may
Remember me fondly with a glass in your hand

Nothing can be closer than our thoughts of the other
Floating like a mirage over this dry earth – the springs
Of our lives flowing hopelessly to too-perfect rhymes of another
Yes – we could be the squatness of that ugly prickly thing
Dwelling alone on the legend of rain