INFLORESCENCE

Even without their fibre optics and shrill beeps

the flowers looked abnormal. Chrysanthemums

loomed huge, gladioli towered like human sized

sex toys of the future, a monstrous polymorphous

hibiscus swamped by whorls of livid orchids

loured in the shape of a wide-belled trombone.

The intravenous feed snaked from my forearm

into something like a sound desk. Similar feeds

were networked from the same console into the stem

of each plant and when the white-coated woman

flicked a switch a webbed mesh of illuminous green

tendrils, calyxes, stamens glowed. My forearm hummed.

‘Now sing something,’ she said. I found it difficult

to get started but the flowers straightened,

ready for performance. I don’t know from what occult

source it sprang but eventually an air beckoned

quietly: ‘I was sick and tired of everything, when I called

you last night from Glasgow.’ The technician frowned

but immediately the belladonna lit up neon hyper-

pink and played a plaintive yet buoyant melody

as if a synth, and soon ‘soup-pah-pah, troop-pah-pah’

from the clematis and enormous madonna lily

rang out in harmony and begonias sang ‘beams are gonna

blind me,’ flickering red, purple, blue and loudly

I felt my corolla open, petals within unfurling light

when the nasturtiums and tulips rose above themselves

for ‘I know its gonna mean so much to-oo-NIGHT’

and the console blew—leaving only darkness, silence,

an overripe stench. She said ‘steady progress’ with tight

lips and wheeled me back to the ward’s dismal fluorescence.