Dead Flowers Remembered

Dead flowers,
sang the Stones,
dead flowers
make a proper gift,
and roses
on a grave
make for
a proper response.

I don’t know
if that’s true,
but once
an angry woman
laid a fifty dollar bill on me

screaming that she
could not return
flowers I had given her
since they were already
dead and discarded.

I know
I could have used a grave
right then
in which to hide from her
and I can still feel
her blowtorch eyes today
though I truly cannot recall
what I did
to earn such
a rock and roll shaming
as that.