the pruning
RC deWinter 
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after another mostly sleepless night
spent waking in the grip of dreams i didn't want to have
i woke to the whine of hungry hedgeclippers
decapitating the forsythia
wild and unruly
and after sixty years in ignored captivity reluctant to bloom
long branches lay in heaps awaiting their raking
and the trip to the landfill where time and weather
will turn them into loam for suburban lawns

they had to die
sacrifices to the done thing
and the ocd of the gnome who owns them
and i wept
knowing if it weren't for the hungry tongues of public opinion
i another wild unruly captive
watered only by derision
would be a sacrifice as well
sent to wherever it is the nonconforming are buried