Death as a Tattooed Florist

Black dahlias and daisies
Funeral flowers,
How gothic, how darkly glorious
The promise of death in the breath of a baby
Clouds of white, humming bees that sting 
And leech the softness from your skin

Replacing it with a spike of pain 
In the middle of your back
Where angel wings have grown
The scars on your chest blooming tattoos
Skulls and empty eyelets
Moths on the insides of your wrists
Roses blooming down the lengths of your arms, 
thorns pricking in the brambles

And your mouth, dark red
Neck choked in black twine 
And an onyx triangle framed in silver, 
glinting in moonlight
In the walled garden of night-blooming flowers, 
You taste the morning dew with a wisp against your tongue

Teeth metallic and clicking 
On the bracken lingering of flowers
Perfume permeated into the hollow of your throat,
And the veins of your wrists, 
where moths pinned to your skin struggle to fly
Cutting points, both of them
A breakaway from this existence 

But you are not one to escape, 
You are one to destroy
The harvester
The cutting of the fields, 
Plunge the scythe into the earth
And reap your reward, 
The petrichor stained roots forming a cage
Around your incredible lungs, exhale
The narcotic essence
Of being alive

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