Pressed Flowers (Poetry)

Imagine how pressed flowers feel,
crushed between two weighty tomes —
volumes labelled Life and Death,
closed and untranslatable.
They’re not for reading after all —
the pages are for slipping in
mementos — things we like to keep.
A filing system, random, safe
with enigmatic clippings, notes
on backs of leaflets, references
flagged with markers, ragged maps
of what was once significant.

The tissue paper of our days
separates as petals bleed
their juice and colour slowly dry
to brittle idiosyncrasies.
We live in books, our dust is theirs,
the finger marks, the sigh still trapped
inside a poem echoes through
the spine, tells nearly everything
its reader understood of Love —
reveals small footnotes to the soul
in cryptic clues, faint pencillings
of someone who we used to be.