what if they are just flowers, not eviscerations like you
need them to be? haughty drops in sleek glass time
good-humored mythic stand-ins of a sort

for this is your plan then? to be with the roses; to
lambaste yourself with half-hearted spite? no hours,
just the recursive wedding of your every arrival to a brief
absence of a turnstile pain?

some part of you will forever envy sadness when read
as a static and moth-eaten thing—petulance made easy. but some
-where, close, the same catbird watched you dig that hole for weeks
on end: something saw you, growing, despite staring down.
   bat orchids somewhere
   languid and fussing

   —like karma on concrete—

   through a chicken-wire fence