Nobody plants the love in "vantesalad". It turns up the way weeds do, pushing through gray cobble where nothing was meant to grow. The speaker has been "dragged into" a "forbidden" position "against my will", eyes shut, and the first image is already a small rebellion: flowers "blooming out of spite / in all the wrong places." Love here is an uprising, and the poem spends its length trying to decide what to do about it.
The central idea is that feeling cannot be governed, and that trying to tend it only hurts. Love "has the nerve to grow untamed / like the thorns of coloured roses / always hurting the one who nurtured them." The speaker is the thing being broken: the "gray cobble / that cracks in weary corners", the "garden that cannot hold the ivy down." The word "weary" matters. It suggests this has happened before, and "it's been said, it's been unsaid / again and again" makes the cycle of confessing and retracting part of the poem's sound. Even "another love seeks you" implies the pattern repeats.
The poem's most persistent image is a colour. Blue appears as "the infallible blue" of the beloved's charm, then as a "blue graveyard", then as something that "spreads like ink" and makes the speaker's nerves and arteries the page it writes on. The word is attractive and deadly at once, which is the poem's whole mood. Blue also leads to the sea: the arteries "can't billow enough", and by the last stanza the beloved is "a sea you'd try to behold and fail." The blue is not only a colour but a body of water, too large to contain.
The poem has no regular meter and no formal rhyme scheme, but it is not careless with sound. Look at the line endings: "grows through", "the infallible blue", "creeps through", "in the direction of you", "irrefutable of you". That long *oo* sound is the nearest thing to a rhyme scheme, and it quietly joins the beloved, the colour and the act of seeping in. Other sounds work inside lines. "Against my *will*" returns as "*will*ow" and "*wil*t", so the willow's refusal to bend with the wind, "because it would wilt", reads as the speaker's will being worn away. The hard *c* of "cobble", "cracks", "corners", "creeps" and "course" gives the middle stanzas a brittle, splintering texture.
The structure acts out the content. The fourth stanza ends mid-thought on "wilt", and the next line, "in the direction of you.", stands alone. The speaker holds back and the sentence leans toward the beloved anyway. Everything is lowercase and almost unpunctuated, and the syntax sometimes slips. "Such is your charm, the infallible blue" fuses two thoughts, and the closing "the love / irresolute, irrefutable of you" bends ordinary word order. Love has stopped obeying grammar too.
The vocabulary of negation holds the poem together: "uncontrollable", "untamable", "unfamiliar", "uncanny", "undefined", "irresolute", "irrefutable". Love is described mostly by what it refuses to be. The last pairing is the sharpest. "Irresolute" means unsettled, and "irrefutable" means impossible to argue with. The love is both undecided and undeniable, and the poem ends there without choosing.
The epigraph, «scatter like petals, not broken glass», frames the whole piece as a request about how to fall apart. The speaker expects to be "the first to fall", and the word "slain" sits next to the gentle "meaningless caress", as if the violence were soft. The title is a coinage the poem never explains. One plausible reading, and it is only an inference, is that it names a tangle of mixed things, like the poem's mix of roses, weeds, ivy, ink and sea.
The poem is worth reading because it takes the old comparison of love to a garden and turns it hostile. Nothing is pruned or harvested, and the gardener loses. It also admits that the speaker both resists and admires what is happening, so the "you" at the end feels like a surrender rather than a triumph.