If once in your life you come across a beautiful flower,
Don't pick it up,
It'll die.
At first, the flower might dance in the wind;
Happy, with its face beaming brightly.
It might even say, "I'm so glad you plucked me from that boring bush."
You take the flower home,
Learn its name.
You do all sorts of things together;
And you ask yourself how on earth you even lived,
Without this flower to liven you up;
How did you even manage to push through,
Devoid of a companion to boost you up.
You suddenly feel so light like floating, you wonder why.
Then, the flower makes you realize,
How sometimes, emptiness can be heavy too.
And that you’ve bottled too much emptiness for so long now.
But you picked the flower.
One at a time, its petals would slowly fall
“When you pick a beautiful flower, it dies.”
Once you realize this,It's too late.
The flower might survive a couple more days,
If you place it in water;
But this won't stop the unavoidable.
It won’t save it;
It won't prevent it from succumbing to its painful death.
You’ll place it gently on the ground.
Tell it you’re sorry over and over again.
But, at this time, it’s had enough of your *******.
It has gotten tired of hearing how sorry you are all the time.
It’ll tell you how lazy you are,
Because all you do is stay inside your ******* cave.
It’ll tell you how you are never contented,
You say, the flower takes the stress away.
But here you are, still stressed with ******* life.
It’ll tell you you’re too weak,
Because you can’t lift yourself up with all this hate behind you;
You always fall on your knees and learned to walk with them instead.
The flower will tell you that all you did was hurt it.
From the moment you cut it from its stem,
To plucking the unwanted leaves it had.
It’ll tell you how drained it became when you snatched it,
That it can no longer smile like it used to,
And that you should carry the emptiness again;
This time, all by yourself.
The flower withers.
So if once in your life you come across a beautiful flower,
Don’t **** it.
© Peter Simon
2018