Rose

This city has so saturated my life with everything I love that I'm sick of it and want to retreat into those things that I detest. If I see one more mediocre steampunk/tattoo/cabaret/burlesque/top hat/gypsy/circus/twisted vintage-vibe performance/party/gallery opening I'll vomit sequins and bile and bits of feather all over your studded leather corset.
Corsets corsets corsets I'm on this boat and I can't get off of it and I'm marrying my father and all I have around me are corsets with the bones coming out of them and some woman who says she will make me a new one for "varrry goot prrrrice" but I don't want a new one I just want the bones to stop coming out of the ones I have and stabbing me. And the boat has docked but I can't find the fucking gangplank. It was here just a moment ago, but now there are performing elephants in the way. Performing elephants with feathers and sequins spewing from the tops of their heads, shuffling through muck and sawdust and blocking my exit.
I finally give up my quest for the gangplank and immediately find myself on land, wandering through academic buildings. Oh! the womblike safety of a structured, academic life! Go to class, read this, write that, we will stamp your brain with knowledge. You will feel accomplished while accomplishing nothing. You will become accomplished without even trying. We will protect and provide for you. But when the circus comes to town you will not see it. You will hide behind your structure and your knowledge and you will not risk a venture into the strange and unpredictable real world dream world surreal hallucination nightmare fun just stay on campus where it's safe. Go back to the library, back to the dorm, respect the wise advice of your superiors. Bespeckled men in stately robes myopically roaming the quiet halls. Those who live live only in the mind. The in tell ect.
All that talk of emotional risk and I still didn't kiss her goodbye.

The End

...and an encore:

Goodbye, goodbye, my creeping rose
From your tall terrace, heaven knows
You won't see me here on the ground
I'll have to yell and run around
But still your eyes will skyward be
If roses look and roses see
Except they don't; or hear, or feel
Insensible, those flowers real
Waste not your love on flowers, fool
(Unless you are a garden tool)
Romance a woman or a man
And toss all this ridiculous poetic metaphor in the can