in a middle of a room
stands a suicide
sniffing a Paper rose
smiling to a self.
– e.e. cummings

At night, the skeletons
come out of my closet to dance.
All of the half-formed, unbalanced dead
line up for a sort of gruesome waltz.
I conduct an orchestra of one thousand lies,
but the beat becomes their own,
moving at the pace of their rusted limbs.
With no intention of letting me sleep,
they group together
in a middle of a room.

In the dim light, the notes fade away;
the rhythm jars, trying to keep pace
with each mismatched pair.
Grating on my ears, and theirs
(if they had any)
the music falls away from any known tempo
and races to record every cracking joint.
My lamp shines intrusively through their gaps
so I can see, in the midst of my skeletons
stands a suicide.

He offers me his hand, and smiles sweetly,
but I only dance alone,
when all my skeletons have gone to bed,
because the dead need more sleep than me.
So I decline politely, claiming some excuse or other;
telling a guest I didn’t want to dance
would be bad manners.
They might not come back,
yet there is something strange about his
sniffing a paper rose.

Maybe he remembers the smell
of the roses in his mother’s garden,
wherever that was, however long ago.
He replaces the scentless flower in an empty vase
and slides into the closet with my skeletons.
I almost ask them to come back;
it’s hard to waltz alone,
but I know they’re tired,
so I go about the next day’s business,
smiling to a self.