I open my eyes, look up at the clock,
which now, unbeknownst to me,
ticks backwards.

I sigh, gazing at the window,
only to be met with the sun
setting like a stranger,
unwilling to share its grief
as it had done before,
with its awry, dark clouds
and tear-streaked face.

The flower pressed
between the pages of a book I once read,
now lay wilted.

It was, I reckon
too late to realize,
the stars that once graced the nights,
now were lifeless and forgotten.

Glancing down at my bloodstained hands,
and the hollow shell of a person
that once bore my name,
my piteous heart dripped
with forlorn anticipation.

It was then,
when I heard the whispered hums of a dirge,
the very disdain coating my guilt,
That I had once vowed to purge.

From the start,
it wasn’t the wilted flower,
or the lifeless stars,
that were dead--
it was me,
the person who I was before.