The image of the garden
The likelihood of success
The memory of afternoons slaving away
The absence of film footage.

Very fast forward thinking
Each year is subliminal plotting
The edging is border frontier
The flower beds will cost something dear.

I am not the footfall soldier
Clowning around for lawn mower cuttings
It is a labour of love without reward
To plough the land and scatter expectation.

The Council will collect the clippings
The parents will be pleased with hedge trimmings
It’s time to paint the lonely shed
It’s not going to be Cedar Wood or Red,
There’s time waiting for us with some internet shipping.

AI Summary

Your poem becomes a single, steady meditation on labour, memory, and the quiet negotiations we make with time: the garden appears first as an imagined ideal, then as a place shaped by years of unrecorded effort, where each season feels like subliminal plotting and every border or flower bed carries a hidden cost; you reject the role of the obedient worker, insisting that this tending is a “labour of love without reward,” even as councils, parents, and domestic expectations claim the results; and finally the lonely shed waits to be painted in a colour that is neither romantic nor symbolic, ending on the wry, modern truth that even hope and renewal now arrive through internet shipping, making the whole piece a reflection on duty, identity, and the slow, unglamorous work of cultivating a life.