The Last Rose (+1)

Ichor running through her veins

All blood is pushed aside

Her eyelids shut, her heart on ice

My fate she would decide

Wilted romance, rotting vines

Garden left in thorns

A lonely rose from last years bloom

Bent over in her scorn

New seeds unplanted, sterile lay

Her cold impounds the soil

To blow within a fallow lust

Abandoned there to toil

With one more look, beyond all hope

My vision love impaired

Her verdict guilty, poison laid

—in blindness I despair

(Longwood Gardens: February, 2022)

The Same But Different

Piecing it together

for a second time

the result was not the same

The years had altered

the way each piece fit

a strange familiar game

Instinct overwriting

what memory lost

the picture starts to clear

My past and future

now conjoined

—as moments reappear

(The New Room: March, 2022)