You can almost watch them grow, how swift they come up mid summer and grind their way towards the sun. They dare the cutlass come. Believe they’ll extract their own small gorge of flesh in return. Bull thistle thug with it. Come bees, come. painted lady butterfly, come. goldfinch come. but bull thistle stays the cattle, taunts the man with the machete, grows taut and leans toward the crib’s front door.
Bull thistle rap sheet long. Invasive they say; hardy and armed. Bull thistle sentinel the walkway and watch West side streets. The boys draw long steel but Bull thistle OG—keep a blade in its cheek. How it finds and keeps purchase in the leaden soil is its own mystery, but I’ll not fuck with its leaves or kingly crown though my liver might could use its milled essence for tea, to purify the engine of my body’s eternal longings to magic the brain to alchemy into night’s most ruthless conspirator.
So sudden and brazen they show together, I imagine the cicadas and them in brilliant cahoots, the boys drumming their insides nearly loose as the purple crowns nut forth their cotton heads. Late summer; another song humming from the East and North. The hawk is coming it says, a warning blast even on these last days of MidWest swelter. And the cicadas answer back in their cuffing season moves, their desperate abdominal rattling not unlike the post 2AM hour at the club, the holler more brash and outlandish than early on when we thought we would be young and lovely all night.
Bull thistle answers too. Reaches a tap root into the dirt beneath the contaminated lithosphere. Bull thistle talks tall shit now, threatens to reach down even to the earth’s mantle to hold on to what it needs to survive the coming brick. My locked up brothers say winter is time to get back to the trap – to prepare for the months ahead, to make-ready for another summer, stack bills for the eventual get-out; the everyman dream of not being the one whose face air brushes a t-shirt when the days get long. Bull thistle trappin. Bull thistle tappin. Is the too-loud analogy here. Bull thistle bussin wild shots and shouts of white clots and clouts to hieroglyph these blocks and clods of earth it reps. I respect – get down low and fling my blade around its roots let homie grow the season long, and wave its limbs at the bees and birds and streets. This simple sweat I milk from the bitter earth is win enough for me. I heed the thistle, sip my gin and plot my winter work. It’s coming. Cicadas ain’t whistling for nothing. I bid the purple crown and thorny scepter adieu.
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