what kind of rose

what kind of rose would you install in your cigarette showing

others your mud pies a string of light splattering water in rows

domino-style this halo around my head is too hot and makes my ears

sweat would you take your hammer and smash it open so I can get

some air shards from my broken halo cut into my forehead and blood

like tea from used teabags drip over porcelain—tears from snotty babies

dew drooling off pumpkins in a perspiring garden an elevated disc

a cup of mosquito larvae rising and falling in a dance of linear perspective

we speculate on roses that answer all our obnoxious questions an oracle

in circular pink pinnacles a wasp from the depths of the ovary says

evacuate our dreams and illusions if we want to survive the apocalypse

abandon our convictions which make us convicts to our realities

realities erupt—hot ash and embers fall in our hair as we shout down

our masculine/feminine identities embers form crystals red yellow blue

green violet around us in strings of water wait while I adjust my underwear

underneath the clear surface a translucence that enhances the chromatic blur

rainbowed hedges imagine a waterfall only in reverse crashing over fir trees

turned to stone imagine a snake glistening in the breeze bathing the affluent poor

deprived of their sense of wholeness till their peels shrivel and juice oozes

onto their white robes staining them red blue purple emerald malachite

exceptional bastards we are of the gods who inhabit the mountains

and crumble down upon us in shards and gash our foreheads helplessly

with symbols that add up to 666 since we are destined to destroy ourselves anyway.