The Scent of Roses.

I have discovered that my blocked nose
is not the reason I can’t smell roses.
The scent has been cut out of the genus
for the sanity of sensors on cargo airplanes.
What then, about my children and their’s,
when they discover old books on the shelf
and ask me, “Father, what did roses smell like??
What about poetry, and the Nineteenth century?
How would I tell the tale of family Plantagenet,
with flags as dead as Lancaster and York?

This tragedy seems so terribly unfair when roses
are so much prettier than instruments on planes,
every petal a miniature piece of God’s own skin.

I need to walk down to the roadside florist if I can
get out of this sweaty blanket into this chilly weather
and find one of these shitty roses so I can dismember
its petals one by one. I speak a litany with every thought,
she loves me, she loves me not, she wants me extinct
bred out of this world for ease,
not as much as a thank you or please.

The tragedy to be told is that women are not supposed
to be the main course in your life, the glorious bouquet of roses
that you set the table around. They are more like condiments
to an existence already charmed, but if the ketchup has gone rotten
it tends to put a damper on how everything tastes and everything smells,
I can’t smell the flowers and there are too many forks.