It is Imbolc - the rise of Spring. You’d think I would have something joyful to post, but the thing that called to me was this. I don’t know what it is - a poem? The start of a lyric? A bit of journalling, maybe.

There are roses
There are roses in my oven / I am trying to preserve them / They are drying up and shrinking / I don’t know what I was thinking they would do / It should be obvious / You take a thing of beauty / Such a precious living beauty / And you chop its fucking head off / Or you put it under pressure till it can’t breathe anymore / So it shrivels and it shrinks and all the colours start to fade / And where it once was rich with colour / Now it’s stinking out the house / Because it’s dead / Not even dying / It was cut down in its prime / And I can’t bear the smell of roses in this terrifying time when all the roses in the garden which are all the different colours have their heads chopped off with scissors or their petals torn away and then they’re shoved into an oven that’s encrusted with the burning of the past that no-one cares about and all they do is shrink and then they vanish till there’s just a distant memory of a garden filled with all the lovely roses / All the loveliest of roses / Such a garden filled with roses / With the loveliest of roses / There are roses in my head / I am trying to preserve them / They are crying out and dying / I don’t know what we are thinking /
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Preserving things often changes them. I think about this a lot. The act of preservation. Thanks for the not poem.