The Flowers

The saccharine smells of the temporary greenhouse hit my senses and send shocks of anger up my spine.
The smell pierces my nose with a rude softness.
The daisies and roses form one last shrine for the body,
while they cough and spit

 A fog so thick you could swim in it.
The odor weighs down the air in the room,
while passerby in their nylon blend blackness stir it up,
sending licks of the Rodger Families roses to my lips.

 There’s a falseness to some of these Nice people’s apologies.
They say an essay with a hand shake, a hug, a few tears and some eye contact.
How serious the circumstances are, determines the volume in the room;
and people tend to shed their skin in the deep end of the silence.

The souls in which the universe had made fools of are sent to the front of the class,
their hands rip at their chest cage as they wail and bleed at their podium.
To the old and sick, this is a promise for the future,
To the youth and average, it’s the unsolvable.

 The body is a shell that once held a mollusk,
that is now sentenced to a slow, watery degradation into non-existence.
It's a pile of earth that was once a rose,
But is now loose and fearing the next strong wind.

 It's an empty boat stuck in purgatory,
covered in suspiciously distracting red fish scales.
It's a photograph so sharp, that it almost looks real.
It's a reminder that you are still living.

 And so, these flowers will soon be in the garbage.
The body and its box will soon be in the ground.
The mourners will soon laugh again;
all silently preparing for the next time around.

Keegan Shaw 10/28/19