I see the clouds on the horizon and the sun setting lies below and its rays reach out to touch down on the earth one last time.

The morning glories are all that are prospering in my garden and they weave their web, laying out tendrils that threaten to devour and choke out all that is around them.

The garden is hopeless. It is nothing more than a bed of morning glories. A metaphor.

It will end up at the end of the season, laid over in a nasty wet, slimy black web that has stunted its growth and hindered anything else from growing.

It is only poison now that is the anecdote. I cannot plant anything new. It will rapidly be taken over. The morning glory is a sinister plant.

It reproduces prolifically and displays the most delicate of flowers that bloom in the early morning sun and sleep in the afternoon.

They shine as a soil stabilizer and erosion prevention but oh! the wickedness they birth.

It lies waiting in the cold wet earth all winter; it needs no sun to flourish and the more you break it and pull it, the more it grows.

When you till, it only groans in joy and ecstasy knowing that it will grow from the tiniest broken shred.

It cannot reach to heights except on the backs of others and everything in its path must lie prostrate or support its upward thrusts.

One has no choice. I feel its oppression even from the warm sheets of my bed; at night they even grow. The fragmented stems are growing, even in the wheelbarrow beneath my window.

I may stay for hours on my knees in front of them and pull at them if I wish.

I may rip them from the stems of all of my plants but they mock me from the far reaches of the garden. I will never be able to touch them with my scratched and bleeding fingers.

My hands are stained and torn from trying to grab at them and they twist and turn in one one another in a warp and weft and ropes of vines just under the surface of the soil.

They are peeking out through the garden wall. They hiss and twirl in their hideous dance.

I want to give them a surprise party and then shock them in their joyous glee and spray them in the nose, eyes and mouth with something toxic.

2003 April 20