The Consent Garden

Key bowl full of plastic fobs: arrivals, departures.
A lamppost plaque with a QR bleached to milk.
We seed the courtyard together; phones hum,
our micro-permissions pooling like rain in grout.

Tomatoes blush when everybody’s in—
no lurkers, no sleepers, no phones face-down.
A packet of heirloom seeds goes round;
someone jokes about ancestors on dial-up.

Then the new tenant moves with the hush of a box on felt.
Her device sings to itself. Flowers open
with no ping, no nod, no chorus click.
A bed rises fast—a green, unmannered breath.

The app shows a dent in the neighbourhood battery.
Screens dim at dusk in an unasked brightness,
privacy peeling like paint. But the fruit is sweet,
and the food bank sends fewer boxes this week.

We meet under the lamppost. A moth worries the QR.
Do we rip out the bed that feeds us
or learn to live with a garden that never asks?
We vote with our thumbs. The breeze moves through the leaves,
already fluent in our answer, whatever it is.