My Bleeding heart

My bleeding heart is growing through your fence
You’re annoyed, I’m not dense!
That was not your plan
For the span
Between your cherry tree and gate
A clean picket slate
But my over-zealous plant seems to exaggerate
Its claim on the property it can stake
My mistake

The lady next door is losing her life to a malfunction her body cannot seem to correct. We call it cancer so that we can externalize it and make it the villain but it really is our own body turning against us. If only we would have eaten different or been more cautious we might avoid the tentacles of the monster lurking in the shadowless inside. She sits by her living room window to squeeze the last ounce of joy out her misery. So her husband asks me if it would be okay to trim my front yard tree so that she might see the neighbourhood a little better. I will not deny this simple pleasure even if it means that an already shabby looking tree looks even less respectable. Hidden away from sight she sits and stares out past my tree. She is looking uglier each day. My tree looks uglier than it ever did before. She feels even uglier than she ever has before and I forget that when I look at my tree. I’m struck by the inconvenience of illness. It really messes things up….

Your bleeding heart is growing through my fence
I’m not annoyed, I’m not that dense!
You would have kept those blooms
to yourself if you could have – not shared the doom
impending - coming too soon
with the quarter moon
rising and the darkness and the gloom
when your bleeding heart will stop growing
through my fence…