A Wild Rose

This bridge has arched the lake's narrows for a century, flanked on either side by Autumn trees shedding their faded leaves, blowing with the first snowflakes across worn gray stones of my spirit. Six months ago you felt the first pain. Now you lie in white sterility of hospice care, continually exorcizing the feeding tube, a final tether binding you to earth, where the morphine pump wheezes every fifteen minutes and missionaries advise prayer to the strength-less living. Your a**hole oncologist told me your suffering was none of my business. I told him to take his prognosis, as suffocating as the pine cleaner lingering like miasma over hallway linoleum, and get the f**k out. From the corner of my eye I spot a wild rose sprouting on the bank at the base of a haggard maple, an anomaly in bleak October, glaring crimson as my resentment, angry as the dream when I said, I'll be your will when yours is gone. Knowing full well it won't survive the winter, I give fate the finger from my dismal perch, just as I gave you two dozen such blooms this Mother's Day. I'll see you in Spring, rises the phoenix from my Summer ashes. The flurries thicken around me like a gathering of angels. With eyes stinging I toss plucked petals of pennies into the Judas lake while wishing as hard as I can. 12/31/18