Speaking in Tongues

 

Image source: WikiMedia Commons

Photo by Joshua Veitch-Michaelis,  Leamington Spa, England

Over the crest of a hill of great effort lies a word garden of dreams. The garden has many beds filled with buds of potential and bright yellow promise. Its gardener tends it (except when he doesn’t), fertilizing the shoots of new growth with bullshit and the occasional smile, then watering them down with venom and sometimes cheap wine. 

Hopeful passersby who stumble upon the garden pause to listen to the language of flowers and the sales pitch of their gardener. Both wax poetic but with words that are full of holes. “Here,” the gardener says. He hands them a lush bouquet of purple platitudes and false promises from one of the beds hidden in the back of the garden, along with his secret formula for success packaged in a mouthful of emptiness. “Take this formula and fertilize your own potential and promise, and they are sure to grow.”

The bouquet speaks the language of friendship but the words are in code.  They actually mean: “I really don’t give a damn; don’t you fuckers know that?”  Sadly, the passersby don't know that. They come from a place where the bouquets speak sweet truth and friendship means caring. The realization that they’ve been duped crashes down hard. But everyone wants to believe in dreams, don’t they, and the word garden looks like fertile ground for growing seedling dreams into blooms of success. So some (the hopelessly naïve ones, perhaps) will return to the garden again and again, hoping that the gardener and his bouquets might really mean it next time. Fortunately, most of them will eventually figure out that the garden produces nothing but disappointing pipe dreams and heartache.

Meanwhile, back in the garden, the buds of potential never open and the promise reneges. It isn’t long before broken dreams wither and die, quickly choked back by crabby grass, cockspur, and deadly nightshade.  And the gardener grows bitter like the weeds in his garden, wondering why no one comes by anymore. Alas, he never understood the language of his own flowers when they told him with their dying breath (in code, of course) that the only thing that grows in gardens fed with toxic waste is loneliness.

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Linked in at the Tenth Daughter of Memory