I don’t know flowers
so I couldn’t tell you their names
but I passed a cluster of them
on the way to work:

they were light purple long thin buds.
maybe some kind of lavender?  
I don’t know

but since the published poets
were always banging on about flowers
I thought, what the hell
let’s see what all the fuss is about
and I bent down
to have a sniff:

I didn’t like them.

they smelled of the cleaning aisle
of the supermarket I work in,
like those big fat plastic bottles of washing conditioner  
that almost always came off the pallet damaged
and leaked their heavy synthetic sludge everywhere,
saturating my work polo,
so I’d have to spend the rest of the shift
red-eyed and wheezing,
weighed down,
stinking of an old lady’s tart church perfume …

maybe the published poets
are right,
maybe the smell was nice
before we
manipulated and marketed it
and gave it to people
like me
to take off pallets and stack on shelves

but it’s just too late for me:
that cluster
of light purple long thin buds
was just
an appropriated trick

you know,
like poems about flowers?

anyway.
I grimaced
stood upright
and carried on walking to work:

Julie had called in sick
so they were making me
go in early.

– Paul Tanner