Lily Falls

Resplendent from your benign beginnings
Poised green pods that whisper from buckets
and buckets in Tesco, displays that waver
plastic-coated crackling in a fan-assisted breeze.

I pluck you out with juices trailing
but the plastic packet hides powdered life support.
You pass me in ceremony with potatoes and coffee,
are lit-up briefly by a web of laser beams. Price
for being but two weeks guaranteed:
Less than a week, the first petals wilt, drop.
Your place on the windowsill - a focal point
to passing eyes, and olfactory madness within.

Come in and join our lily club
Play our game and guess the smell. Is it
flowers, or something akin to old lady's soap?
Or perhaps the evening scent of tobacco plants.

To the sensually challenged it smells like wee.
I suggest, as I remove another petal
that perhaps you ought to see a doctor
and heedlessly cast the still-bright petals
into a plastic crackle-bag.

And now the scent-laden pollen sticks
fall to stain the draining board. Stainless
steel stains, as it should. When nature needs revenge
for being misunderstood. I scrub scrub scrub it out.