ALT DOROTHY WORDSWORTH The daffodils can go fuck themselves. I'm tired of their crowds, yellow rantings about the spastic sun that shines and shines and shines. How are they any different from me? I, too, have a big messy head on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind. I flower and don't apologize. There's nothing funny about good weather. Oh, spring again, the critics nod. They know the old joy, that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot of future growing things, each one labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang. If I died falling from a helicopter, then this would be an important poem. Then the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren't you meat? But I won't be another bashful shank. The tulips have their nervous joie de vivre, the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop interrupting me with your boring beauty.
