Weekend chrysanthemums bloom
lurid across sidewalks
every six days in this nameless
district.

Urban perennials,
they flash of memory,
dripping classic Eastern insignia across a cracked glaze of pavement,
hold a fitful feeling of perspiring glass and close darkness
amidst sweaty bass thumps.

Splashes of bacchanal remainder,
smiling
colorfully frail,
premonitions
struggling weekly upwards from greying asphalt graves.

Stunningly regular tendrils
demarcate their lines between silly and epic;
tossing about morbidly humane questions about consistency
and origin.

Dance around them to your own foggy memories and ask
if laughter or judgment
accompanied their bursting
into a midnight world
on the sway home
to light and better things.

Who doesn’t like flowers –
I wonder –
if their exuberance will be there tomorrow,
Fading away
with the footsteps of those who planted them,
until the next rain
or Friday.