Noor-Ul-Ain Sahi Poet Free verse

The flowers died Monday

The flowers died Monday.

Their heads bowed first—
a quiet, obedient surrender.
No new bouquet at my front door.
No doorbells ringing
to announce beauty had survived another night.
Only stems stiff with memory
and petals already learning
how to disappear.

I ordered a new bouquet.
It was supposed to come Friday.
I told myself that meant something.

Tuesday, the quiet arrived.

Not the peaceful kind.
The kind that sharpens itself.
The kind that presses its ear to your chest
and waits for you to notice it listening.
The kind that screams
without making a sound
and reminds you
why you keep yourself busy—
why stillness has always felt
like a threat.

Wednesday, I picked up the pen.

I wrote what the silence whispered
when it realized I was alone.
I learned how my mind speaks
when no one interrupts it.
How it doesn’t comfort—
it catalogs.
It names things carefully,
as if preparing an inventory
for a future without me.

Thursday, understanding arrived
without mercy.

It wasn’t just the world decaying.
Not just humanity unraveling
in polite daylight.
It was me.

I was dying slowly—
the safest way to die.
No spectacle.
No witnesses.
Just erosion disguised as routine.

Friday came.
The bouquet didn’t.

I let the silence sit beside me.
Let it breathe my air.
Let it tell me its secrets—
how it grows fed on neglect,
how it seeps into bone,
how it doesn’t rush
because it knows it will win.

By then, it had reached the marrow.

Saturday, I picked up the pen again.

But this time, the words cut back.
Sharp as the tip they bled from.
Each line a confession
I didn’t know I was making.
Each sentence a small wound
that refused to close.

Sunday, I realized the truth.

I was already among the walking dead-
the kind that resets the countdown
by breathing,
by letting the heart continue
out of muscle memory.
The kind that keeps choosing tomorrow
not because they want it,
but because habit is louder than despair.

Then Monday returned.

The bouquet arrived—
dead.

Petals collapsed inward,
soft with decay.
Stems bent beneath a spine
too weak to remember how to stand.
The thorns were still sharp, though—
sharp enough to stab their own leaves,
sharp enough to prove
some things survive
only to cause damage.

But the flowers weren’t
the only thing that arrived dead that night.

Something left me
when I opened the door
and took the bouquet into my hands.
Something quiet.
Something essential.

Now the room smells like rot.
And I can’t tell
which of us is more gone—

me,
or the flowers
that died
on Monday.

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