The poets
have staked a claim.
They are not always the type to decide
or declare such things, but
on the matter of the Season of Beautiful Death,
they have unanimously put their dissociated feet down––
Autumn belongs to the poets.

They plant their feet like roots and stand
with limbs like bent branches in half-hesitant salutation of
the low-hanging sun,
and of the wind that smells dangerously
like the citrus-salty sweat on the sternums of
lovers who have long forgotten them,
like smears of strawberry sunset-stained tears on
sticky steering wheel leather,
like caramel-amber irises that they could only then taste by
licking the syrup off the cursive characters
in their own love poems.

Here, now,
with these stacks of decades still decaying in the corners
of our ugly, cluttered crowns,
this is our ritual:
squinting up at the lavender-blue sky, we
concede that we are still broken – (alive, but dying) –
and reinitiate ourselves
as poets.

We breathe in this different kind of death, this
​beautiful
death –
our sticky strawberry reds and caramel ambers displayed like artwork on
these glorious twisted giants –
and we can
pretend we
believe that we
and our heartbreak,
too, are beautiful.

And we look on with aching solidarity
as they burst
into a fireworks display
of a funeral.