Wild Oats

A Poem by Alan-a-Camden

Sow your wild oats. Watch them grow. Watch them kill.

People told me, when I was younger,
   "Sow your wild oats!"
But little did I know that devils
turn wild oats into demons as they grow,
   which demons feast on ghosts
   and become ghosts,
    wrecking what havoc they will on men.

One particular handful of wild oats
I threw on fertile ground grew up,
   despite what I would have.
Those wild oats intertwined into one,
in time, and lodged inside a ghost,
   which shrieked its way to
   the home that I built carefully.
My love took note of a wild oat that grew
up from the ground, underneath a windowsill.
   "I do not know that I wish to wed
   that wild oat."

But I knew not what wild oats can do.
   "No worries grow inside that wild oat!
    "It is only a seed, and will grow into a plant,
    "easily kicked down and crushed."
This word she took for truth, though I worried now.
   I seemed to recall plants growing and harming
   that I had heard of, but I could not remember.

My love grew great, and my love was content.
My life was good, and my home stable.
Somehow I had forgotten that wild oat.
   But it did not forget me.

It grew one night with peculiarity, fast and strong,
twisting snake-like through my window,
   across the floor,
       up the stairs,
           and to my room.
It wrapped itself around my love's soft foot and
drug her to the floor, where it gripped its stranglehold
   and held tight until my love had died.

I yelled for my love's outgrowth, whom I loved,
to run from that wild oat. She reached the yard
   before the oat struck through my
   last hope for love's happiness.
Then, slithering through my love's result,
it escaped, escaped the hacking blade
   that I now held and melted into the dirt.

So hear I sit, testimony to wild oats and love,
head in hands, despairing over both my loves' loss.
And the wild oat, still demonized,
    rises quickly toward the land.