The Fickle Flowers.

It’s what you don’t say, that’s what gets under people’s skin.

They guess at what you say and the issues you skirt, and when you don’t quite give an answer it’s like their minds need to fill in the blanks. They create these elaborate fantasies about what it is we do, what it is we think, what it is we are...

It’s that way with women, often enough. They ask, they say, they throw lures and hope you bite. You brush closely to the bait and might gnaw carefully at the worm on the hook and they build these sand castles that have little base in reality.

But we also build our castles, which are far more fragile, so we keep them under lock and key. We ensconce them away in our labyrinthine hearts lest they get trampled by the fickle art. Much like a spider female hides her womb behind maddening twists of tissue, we hide our cores from the pricking ones in a bizarre role reversal.

As they dance away from us we sway in feigned disinterest, we must play this game of ebb and eddy to lure them into our caves. Once they have come in we falter in fear for we’ve all but forgotten where we've put away the keys. Our inner beings lost, forever cut-off from the outside. In striving to achieve this we lose the children we were and become callous monsters, witnesses in horror as we simply watch: we blunder and plunder and level the gardens.