28 October, 2026

Every week you buy flowers
to leave on the counter, and by the time
they’re in water they’re thirsting.
I watch you watching them while you work.
I tell you you work too much;
you ask shouldn’t I be working.

But flowers only wilt. We both know that.
Dead by Friday, a bin-bound funeral.
I’m not dressed from the waist down
and you laugh. Then Sunday
we go back and do it again.
Some are already drooping in the shop.

Stem water runs down my arm
on the walk home, past the gravestones
we read walking Kendall:
thirteen, too young. And still,
flowers make people happy.
Flowers make you happy.

This summer we bought plants
and forgot them. They sat in the study,
sad like the music I insist on.
Then overwatered, drowned.
Sometimes I look at the flowers,
or the dead plants,

and want to say that’s how this feels.