The B-Sides of the Golden Record, Track Twenty-One: “Ozymandias”

I often want to start these missives with a story 
about something or someone dead. Recently, a moth 
died on my office floor. I marked the passage of time 
by its decay. My supervisors told me that isn’t how time works. 
They said that time bends to light, and that death
is when one’s light goes out, which means that there is no time
that death can effectively measure. We like to give death as a gift,
as when we offer each other bouquets of roses (how perfumed
they are, how studded with wet), which die
the moment we cut their stems. We pass their bodies
back and forth into each other’s arms and we say I love you.
Some flowers refuse the illusion of perfume. Once I stood  
by one that reeked of rotten meat. Time opened wide
as its spathe. I looked in. The light went out. Time went on.