If we could grow vegetables and flowers like puns,
what a sepalous calyxy this would be!
What florescence! What efflorescence!
Pollination would never come cross,
and, at Christmas, all plants would wear anthers!
Pistil-Packing Mamas, in full bloom, full flower,
with late bloomers as a hedge, wearing flowery petal pushers
with no nasty tares and, in season, widows’ weeds,
would ply a weed-eating policy of hoe and sow.
Not a shrinking violet among them! These garden plotters
would need no trowel and error, but would know
to grow after stamen and filament
until all the style was variegated hybrids
and the only stigmata, non-green thumbs.
Nor would we have to wait until spring icumen in
for punlips to lhude sing, cuccu.
Not that life would be all edenic—
you could never enter a garden innocently,
for a petunia might bite you for your lack of wit.
And you might miss being led down the garden path,
for the only sinners here raise too much cane,
nip themselves in the bud, fail to talk in leaflets,
and try to stem their stock.
Even Ms. Camellia Bloomer,
though an intemperate relative of Amelia
and a potted planter in her flush and prime,
would never be allowed to fade upon the vine.
You’d never again be a plain old garden variety
or be arrested for stalking, or get pinched in the bud,
and this primrose path would lead to tell.
No one would fall out of the punlips garden
except for exceeding snake in the sass.
