Was lost somewhere near Magnolia and Glen
Oaks at the bottom of a very dry
mountain and wedged above an underwhelming
indoor mall when I discovered a
lotus flower floating in a pool of chlorine.
And I plucked her from the fumes and hid
her among the lesser vegetation then watched
as it caused a landslide that carried us
down into the Deer Canyon debris basin.
But through it all she bloomed as I stared in awe.
———————-
But you’re too smart for that. You’re all
Buddhists and business, numbers and quantum
physics finding Shakyamuni in the scatter
of the Universe’s own red shifted light. You traced
your lineage back to the same black hole where
we always met up. It was our event horizon, our
costumes of space adventurers. You were the princess
and I was the smuggler and I got jealous when you
took a picture with that space alien. He didn’t
know you. He didn’t know you had lived an entire
lifetime before I found you, always blooming and
seeding at the same. Such a perfect flower, such a majestic
purpose and I wasn’t about to let some alien move in.
We fled to Ikea and hid among the throngs, among
the fellow holograms living on the edge of love.
I realized you were the cause and effect of an entire
Universe that I was just starting to understand.
I closed my dating website account that night.