I never visited the flowers on your nightstand,

Allowed them to decay and gray and wither away in their choking metal vase,

Color leaching out of each silken vein as the same shades vanish from your lips.

Fear operates in relentless persistence for the different,

And Mother Nature abhors me for my angst and apathetic anguish,

As she shatters your nightstand flowers before I can dain to acknowledge their beauty.

We are a premature blossom, bound in a stasis of quiet shame,

A bud nurturing anticipatory petals of such technicolor beauty,

reduced in an instant to the overcast shades of its sepals.

Our Reality devours my imagination in a shameless gulp, 

Spewing out its once sweet remains in a putrid, gray bile,

Spitting his ashen words through fangs stained with the colors of us.

Even in your final state, heart and mind and skin silvered and cold,

My rainbow flowers failed to adorn your nightstand,

My seeds were stunted in cowardice.

Your stem was immune to the chilly hatred of the wind, 

Singing and skiing and soaring through each inevitable gust.

My stem was lacking the beautiful rigor of yours, 

Shriveled at the first touch of winter, wilted at the slightest sniff of breeze.

Why was it then, that Nature’s unwavering stake ruptured your bloom before mine?

Now my petals bloom alone,

Apathetically alone,

In a field burdened with the chilly weight of frost and flurries,

In a field familiar with the wrath of gale and the famished prowl of the predator,

In a field submerged in gray, but for my own fragile petals,

And I must yearn for the ghost of color absent beside me.