pressed flowers are still dead flowers,
like dressing up a corpse.
a naive form of taxidermy;
creating beauty from dead things.

daily, i spend several hours
cowering over mortality,
wondering if i, too, will be
stuffed, positioned in motion,
my presence interwoven
in stories and broken words,
scattered like ashes in the ocean.

or, perhaps, i'll only be
a narrative forever at rest,
pressed
between pages of poetry.