Wiped the snow-dusted grave
The epitaph read, "Everlasting flower!"
I wept

The green field I used to frolic and play
Now shrouded in darken clouds greyed
With soil planted with nothing but graves
Vine and stone tablets with epitaphs engraved

She was thick, erubescent.

Advised not to give her my eyes, I stared:

she was haloed by the diaphanous seat

which held me when she shifted.

Flourishing fiercely, defiant,

she glowered, staining porcelain

like pink tipped damasks; a Fauvist impression.

I believe if she’d had a tongue

she would have screamed,

scolded me for my selfishness-

shrieking as the sorceress’ slain offspring.

My heart cringing, heavy lids like two tomb doors

shielding me like from her quiet contention,

I summoned the scrubs to put her out.

A quarter-life is twenty years,
Forty marks a half,
In forty years you’ll be a stone,
With a stick-on epitaph.

“She was a force of nature,
Brave and bold and bright!”
They’ll say - who never knew you -
As you’re borne into the night.
When really you were old and tired,
And didn’t care to fight.

I saw
the forest--
                --for the
                   trees.