The Buttercup amongst a Sea of Daisies

I emerge from the Siwa Oasis,

Kissed by golden lips.

My mind saturated in Arabian dreams.

Dwelling of subtle hints of Basbousa;

Perfumed flower water.

Sweet semolina trails behind me,

Greeting the bleached soul next door.

Her petals artless.

Naïve in her young simplicity,

She wonders at my magic carpet 

Caressing the dampened grass.

She sways in May’s subtle breeze,

Resting on her duplicate neighbour –

An artist’s canvas.

Upon the Indian Bean Tree

A Pipistrelle Bat

Balances on a tightrope of ambivalence,

Unaware of the abyss underfoot

That pulls her with gravitational force

Into the realm of unblemished reality.

I am foreign here.

A buttercup Lost in a sea of daisies.

A buttercup drawn from his homeland.

Drawn from London to the desert;

From dreaming spires to mesas of casting sugar.

Stolen into a saccharine expanse of gold.

At first I found my neighbours bland,

Sensible,

Remnants of the upper echelons of British society.

Petals white in perfect purity.

They swayed, and never danced.

When the rain poured

They succumbed in fragility.

They seem civilised and saturated in majestic regality,

Yet common and unexciting.

She smiles to me.

She is older than my adjacent neighbour;

Antiquated and speckled with fallen leaves

Of British tea.

Her white petals turned auburn,

Her yellow face daubed in awe

At that colossal Wreck,

Ozymandias.

The man to my left is stooped in strength.

Sadly, I had failed to see him.

His silence as loud as a ship

Preparing to depart for the Arctic circle.

He smiles serenely in this ambivalent abyss;

In this sea of daisies.

His petals,

Now a Victorian Pewter,

Shot with the bullet of a nettle,

Stand strong in last night’s summer storm.

He smiles still.

A veteran.

A young lady stands by,

Distrustful of my buttery bruises,

Believing me to be like the Bupleurum next-door;

Whimsical;

Laced in intricate mystery.

I was.

I am.

I will be –

Always bruised in beautiful brilliance.

I thought her bland.

I thought her unblemished.

I thought her boring.

I was wrong.

She too is bruised,

Blurred in bipolarity,

Blotted with tears falling from the sky,

And bleached with smiles from the sun.

Nervous from the windy atmosphere on Neptune,

And vicious with Venus’s desire.

Mad from Mercury,

And peaceful from Pluto.

Sentimental from Saturn,

And jealous from Jupiter.

She is shameful but shortcutting –

Shearing me down with suspicious looks.

Her third left petal is stained red

With the kisses of a lost lover.

A naked lady;

A Lycoris.

My petals,

Imperious,

Begin to wilt.

Not in age or melancholy or even loneliness,

But in gratitude.

For this abyss of blandness,

Is not an abyss at all.

It is a bouquet of the journey.

Our Journey.

One of innocence and loss.

One of hope and hardship.

One of beauty.

For all we can do is to find sunshine

And feed our soul on a sad day.

I am not foreign here.

I have returned home,

Where the daisies soul is polychrome.