I sat on a stone bench outside the subway station at 72nd St. and Broadway this afternoon, in the vest pocket park there, flashing my eye upon a host of fluttering daffodils. In the bliss of solitude. My little Wordsworth moment. Ah, the promise of spring, and hope springs eternal, yadda yadda… But it’s true, there’s no hope without hope. And this being an election year, promises, promises from the political hopefuls, their rhetoric heating up and outpacing even this unseasonably warm weather.

That’s alright; the time’s out of joint. Looks like the tulips are about to pop two months ahead of schedule and the June peonies have already broken through the ground. I say, let’s get on with it, full speed ahead, and if you’re of the apocalyptic bent (I’m not), you’d better hand it all in before the bell rings and the Mayan calendar runs out this year, anyway. That’s forward thinking. That’s productivity! Let nature have its way.

So I’m there on the bench wondering, what would Mitt Romney do? He’s all about productivity. Would he, casting his eye over the same flower bed, see in each bell of a daffodil the golden trumpet of Moroni blaring atop the Mormon Tabernacle? Hey, it’s still a free country, religious freedom, free enterprise, and all that, but I doubt he’s that poetic to come up with the simile. He speaks in pragmatic, down-to-business, bottom line metaphors. “Corporations are people,” he says. Does he believe the obverse is true—People are corporations?

Nice try. Like father like son. Mitt’s dad once went over to Scotland and tried to convert the Glaswegians to his beliefs. Failed business meeting. They thought his dad daffed.

These daffodils all look about identical to me: same shape, color, scent, etc. No problem. Such is their nature. For someone like libertine Romney it wouldn’t matter if one had an abortion, entered into a same-sex marriage, or secretly held radical leftist views, as long as they all swayed with the breeze in the same direction—that being in the service of the corporation. As if daffodils were people. I mean, corporations.

But I am a poet and a writer, and so wander lonely as a cloud.