The yellow flowers hung gently with their heads drooped so, in the washed glass bottle of baritone reverberation and reservation; it was a sight to see, even on the dullest of days. The most splendid of Ravel compositions could not contain the eerie splendor of decapitated spring in the succinct visage of the tablecloth image set before the man at the table.

He never quite knew what the whole thing was about; why he had become who he was and why he had allowed such personal atrocities to occur. It was a compulsion at best; danced between habitual ritual and addiction in a gaily sought out dip, where hips twist just so and make children giggle behind white dresses on the side lines, wishing they might be older someday and be able to embrace full the splendor of the moment at hand.

In his mind, he counted the dusty steps. One, two, three, and onward up to twenty five. Each and every light deprived particle of earth’s whimsical matter had settled just so on each precipice creating the moonscapes and craters of micro-landscape and layout. His footprints laid deep and lashed out as reminders of what was found in the earthen floor at the bottom of the descent. He wished it had never happened. He cried out at nothing and flung the bottle of bewildered blossoms hard down at the floor and then began to sob. The flowers had done nothing and neither had she.

He had to hold it tight before he lost it. Everything was about possession. He may lose it all; he could always feel the slimy grasp of slipping scent and sundry. With all of that at hand one can get a bit panicky; a tad full of fidget and fury. Could anything really be his? He mused and mulled over this quandary and concluded that only under the most extreme and most unethical circumstances that it could be and upon this glimpse into himself and his actions did he recoil into the denial of all that may or could have occurred if his memory had served him right.

Forty Arabian Knights somewhere, sometime, danced to rhythms that only Hope and Crosby could recreate in their most wild of dress rehearsals and he could not even bear such pipe smoking, whiskey drinking gala with such immediate intensity at hand. Could he be as simple as pizzicato plucking and flautist fever? Of course not and then some, of course. Such redundancies would only make one cringe; they most certainly contained a wince or two for him as the music played on and he could not find anything other than cartoons to race through his mind, or minds as they were. Can-can anyone?

Offenbach shakes, he shimmies, he saunters through convulsions of big band seizure and concludes with an array of illuminations found only right within the minds of those they may be beyond the now,  only found ill within the constructs of the here and now and with such shame they shake their heads and wish for better days.

The man looks down at the broken flowers and their glass. Such forlorn a face is not found at even the most intense of funeral pyres and ponders and pious encounters of the dead looking up from stillness to say goodbye just one last time. Could it all make sense in a vibrato molestation or a simple tambour raucous? No, no; not a sound indeed, but rather the lack of the splay sought out once the ears may be plugged from all the dead flowers that may scream.

The raft is set a blaze. The raft is set a float. The raft done sank with all the remorse that fire can conjure in the souls of set upon folks seeking out more than a corpse can offer.

A stand-up guy trying to stand up and all the while not deserving the generic and stand offish ‘stand-up guy’ moniker, not one damn bit. Shake it off. Dance about. Let the glass cut your bare fattened feet as you move about the hardwood floors that glaze up back towards the sun like honey in a light driven rain. Amber rainbows of reflective pleasure defying the sun and all that could be hidden behind all two scoops of it’s smile. He knows. The sun knows. The body in the basement knows all too well.

The smell has only begun. He knows it well, he knows it gets worse. The worse it gets, the worse it grows and growing, it goes, gets worse you know. Ah, such a shame to have no clue, that what you’ve done is wrong and not even the most obvious of signs even register on any level to perpetuate a fate of redemption’s embrace but rather the implosion of intensity causing the explosion of serenity found within the walls of demented vanity through profanity; a chiseled verity verbosity.

Delusion for delusion’s sake. A fortune riddle wrapped up in gum you can not chew but do so in order to justify the riddle and omniscience that you know not to be remotely applicable; the chew moves moons and makes one swoon to sounds found in tunes with serrated boons. Yes, this is what passes as intellectual in his redundant mind, the mind of a man with a body in the shallow sands of his basement necropolis.

He brushes down his slacks and vigorously shakes them clean of any remnants of sand from the push aside and pull up and out that had to do with the rituals that lay cold in the earthen foundation of his home where he lay his head. He knows full-well of his abode and it’s demons. He knows of his mind and what it may manifest. He knows of the preponderance of his pandering perpetuation. The house knows too, but has no choice.

He goes to the cellar door and holds his ear up close and tight; snug like a lover’s clitoral love. He has no idea what is to be heard but the shrill screams of uncertainty comeing through the splintered frame all the same. He fiddles with the doorknob as if it were his crotch and pulls and tugs at it’s short glass stubbiness. Slowly, he coaxes the door open and finds the closet in the hall. Coats of furs long dead, with times long gone, hang like reminders of who once held dignified decorum in this home and hall. In shock, he moves to the next door by the bottom of the stairs. Once again, to nowhere - a simple closet holds the table linens for the adjourning dining area. A contorted reflex of gape and gore grind across his grimace.

Many a door may be seen, found. A basement, no. A body, no. A simple vase of broken flowers that did not agree with the runny film caressing the yolks of breakfast.

A day filled with hallowed visages of once forgotten grudges held close by the amnesia of revenge.