...Mine Vine Mind...

A broken trellis. 

A sagging arbor. 

A bed of flowers 

   obliterated. 

My mind... 

   Yes. 

My mind is like a 

   ruined garden. 

Oh, it was beautiful once. 

Am I allowed to say that? 

Is that vain? 

Well, only if I portrayed it as 

   still beautiful, 

and as I’ve just told you, 

it most certainly 

is not. 

No matter. 

I’d still like to invite you in. 

Take you for a stroll. 

Having said that, 

our stroll won’t be an easy one. 

No. I now find orientation difficult. 

Quite lacking in direction, find it 

hard to trace a path that leads to 

concise and noteworthy mental locales. 

Yes, the terrain has become somewhat obtuse. 

Alas, but how the milkweed and 

kudzu have taken over. 

Now ever-clinging vines 

choke away thoughts and 

vast overgrowth obscures 

self-realization.

Indeed, I’m…  I’m… 

   I am 

   homogenized. 

There in my brain, 

a mass of woven weed prevails. 

And all such ruminations sprout tendrils. 

Tenacious roots which 

ease their way through 

soggy folds of cortex, 

and there penetrate 

soft and decadent cerebella. 

There… just over there, 

you would have once encountered 

a multitude of rose resplendent flora. 

Heavy, ripe and dripping sanguine, 

it draws you in and there beneath…

     something to repel; 

something to make you wary. 

Oh yes. 

Yes, at one time, 

I was contradiction personified. 

And now, as you pass your hands through 

the dense blanket of overgrowth, 

you come to 

wince and recoil as you encounter the 

pained memory of my 

  former self, 

for here now, 

only thorns remain.  

Rosebuds here are withered 

and forgotten. 

All this aromatic delight 

has fallen to garden floor to become 

one with the humus of fetid earth. 

Those that remain, 

remain dormant and un-bloomed. 

Their verdant green no different 

than all that leprous ivy 

and sumac. 

Yes, my mind is a 

hateful ugly place 

and knowing this, 

I imagine you wonder why 

I’ve have invited you in. 

But here… wait… 

Before you turn and go, 

indulge me this final moment, 

for I’ve one last thing to show you. 

Assuming we can navigate past 

all those stinging nettles, 

you’ll find it there, 

just at the back of my garden. 

It’s there… Just there. 

        Look. 

Thiswas once my garden shed. 

Inside you’ll find a rake; a hoe; 

    a scythe; a shovel. 

These and that wheelbarrow, 

    ill kept and rusted.  

And again, why? 

Why do I show you this? 

Well, you see, 

I have this favor to ask of you. 

Bearing in mind the inherent 

   thistle in my thought, you 

  havemade it this far. 

You’ve made it all the way to my shed 

and having seen my 

   fall from Eden, 

I would ask of you… 

   You who might soil your hands 

   for me…

Am I truly ruined, or 

in the slightest way, 

somehow worthy of  

your gracious and 

   most merciful 

   redemption?  

©06 Jack Hubbell