Nov 06 2007
Call Me Plantman
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By Adam Engel
11/6/07
Call me Plantman.
Summer the War suddenly, not unexpected. For weeks the Nation’s Uniformed Young amassed The Enemy border. Pump of Young like sperm into the vicious Rogue Regime. Carnage ignited a galaxy of screens, monitors. 24/7.
Escape?
Persona: Plantman, Keeper Protector of The City’s office green. Grim fluorescent light can be, will be, serene. I watered, trimmed and dusted corporate flora. Green Man at large. Horticultural Technician, Indoor Landscaper of potted plants. Verdure The City. Complex unruly. Sprout, contort, evolve. Snake-like struggle to?
The Light.
Anchored in cylinders of soil. Dirt. Same thing (for instance: “He soiled his pants. She dirtied her diapers” etc.) Plants too are machines. Input/output.
Me, my Self displaced. Fiction a New Self. Watering can, scissors, agon. Deep daydreams the war.
Rise with dawn, Green Man, Plantman, vigorous magician!
They waited for me. Potted oases of The City. Florescent days accrued — a past! To study and transform. The City was work to be done as if into a girl. Future, coming to a cubicle near you. Watering can, feather duster, scissors. Adjustable Topiary Techniques apron.
In Search Of: Ivy in window sills, creeping up walls. Ficus, Fiddle-leaf Fig, Song of India: Executive Suites. Pothos, Dieffenbachia, Kentia Palm: workers’ cubicles. Dead leaves guidelines for care. Pluck ‘em, chuck ‘em.
“All plants are created,” veteran technicians claimed.
How true. Fundamental problem keeping life alive in the steel-and-concrete City.
Too late to exchange all this? For military green? Experience, not imagine, enemy fire? Lose Self permanently always? Gone? Exotic Time-passes, options. Imagine a camouflaged Self. Exhaustive wrenching of the will. Muscles of Being, weary, relaxed, a fist unclenched.
Release the Me I bore through quarter century.
Adam Engel is a Contributing Editor for Cyrano’s Journal. Adam has published poetry, fiction, articles, and reviews in several web sites and magazines such as CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Online Journal, Hudson Review, Accent, The Concord Journal, Beacon, Art World, Ward6 Review, CounterCurrents, LewRockwell.com, Literal Latte, Lummux, POESY, Chronogram, Press Action,and many others. Adam was a featured reader, along with Robert Creeley, Suzanne Pomme Vega, Robert Bly and others at the Woodstock Poetry Festival, August, 2001, where he read from his first book of poetry, “Oil & Water. He can be reached at , or at his partially completed (very partially) website at www.adamengel.com.
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