ode to a dozen roses

you can never know how I cried
as I crushed each rose,
petals sighing
stems resisting,
bending and cracking like bones,
reminding me of the life
within us all
and how it breaks,
how it shudders under
some greater force
some greater will,
some greater meaning
until it snaps—

you snapped me.
like I did a dozen times,
a dozen rose-heads falling,
suffocating against the trashcan walls.
and I pitied them, their brown petals
once such a striking magenta,
their fragrance once so hopeful,
now stuffed away,
turned to decay.

but as my murderous hands
lamented their task,
my mind suggested an instant compromise:
allow a wilting rose to stay behind,
allow it, dry and dead,
to remind me of these days.
allow a life taken by drought
to nourish a life given (mine)
by your touch,
your cinnamon skin,
your tropical mouth,
your appetite for me.
my life, once a trickle,
now a river surrounding
a scarlet rose in the place where
a decayed brown heart used to be.