No.184: Maybe You Suck at Gardening.

If life gives you lemons
when you asked for grapes, 
bump the lemonade,
throw that ish back in her face
and let her or him or whatever it is know that
you ain’t here for the games.
You meant what you said,
she best come correct,
or else…you’ll cry
like the rest of us do,
pout and vegetate like a vegetable, 
‘cause making sense of your mistakes makes
too much sense and
learning how to play brings
too much stress so
the next time you don’t get what you want — a job, some sleep, that date, some arbitrary grade, a spot on the team, the approval from some arbitrarily appointed authority figure — 
just break down, give it a week,
and go back to the daily grind,
the daily life of an everyday sheep.

Don’t take that stanza personally.
Unless…
unless you want to, in which case you should
follow the trail of woulds, coulds, and shoulds through the maze of self-pity they call adulthood, 
secretly known as adolescence 2.0, 
aka growing old without finesse, unless 
you one of those types — 
the ones that came out the womb prebaked with wisdom 
and blessed with a knack for patience,

but if you like me,
blessed and cursed with a head that’s round and stretched 
like a baby bump pregnant with an ego that only speaks
the language of death,
then I think a better strategy 
than complaining 
would be to take up gardening,
old school, like Adam and Eve, 
before they got carried away with the illegitimate feast.

Or did you not notice?
Their shame came from choosing to disobey, 
to eat what they did not make,
despite everything else the Chef gave.

When life gives you lemons
when you asked for grapes, 
maybe — I’m just guessing — 
it’s because you didn’t plant the right seed
in the first place.

Cover Photo by Brienne Hong on Unsplash