Bougainvillea

Across the vinyl sole of my living room scrapes

gently

the fallen petals, the blushing faces of the Bougainvillea I

picked three days ago

and sentenced to death in a pickle jar.

It doesn't make much noise at all and

in fact

is almost lost entirely

when it mingles between notes of piano jazz and

traffic on the H1

twenty yards beyond my window.

But it forms the verse to a song

the chorus of which

repeats every night at around 3am

when the highway sleeps (making one of us)

and the adjacent brook, the fresh water from Tantalus

chats with itself about topics

only a stream could ever care about

and drifts through my window.

Silence may be golden but

you can't eat gold, or live on it

so jazz will have to do.