Flowers

Every room fills with buds
sprung open like snake heads.

The big, dumb eyes of the chrysanthemums
look jaundiced and sick.

The lilies
have nothing more to give and drop their petals
like small gloves.

Their sweet smell grows more fetid.
My head stays dizzy and numb.

Each day the house
takes on more death, more dying; more doomed flowers
go to pieces.

I want to know whose idea this was,
filling up death
with hundreds of smaller deaths.