Anyone who has read an obituary knows the phrase "in lieu of flowers," the polite instruction to give money or kindness in place of a wreath. Dave Bonta borrows that formula and puts something stranger in the empty space: "an everyday curse." The poem is six lines long and never mentions a death outright, yet the title sets up the whole occasion. Something has ended, the usual gestures of tenderness are being set aside, and what the speaker offers instead is anger, doubt and a restless kind of wit. Its central idea seems to be that grief may need a harsher, more honest ritual than flowers, one that keeps the wound awake instead of dressing it.
The first couplet starts mid-thought, with no capital letter and no punctuation: "as constant as doubt." We meet the comparison before we know what is being compared, so doubt is the first thing we feel. Only then does the second line arrive, long and heavy with abstract nouns: "the necessity of an everyday curse." Putting "necessity" next to "everyday" makes cursing sound less like an outburst and more like a chore or a daily prayer said backwards. The word "curse" also works two ways. It can be swearing, the rough language of someone who is furious, or it can be an affliction laid on a person. The poem doesn't choose, and both meanings fit a mourner who is angry at death and at being left behind.
The second couplet brings in the devil, who "must have patience." The "though" suggests that the devil has a long wait ahead of him, perhaps because everything and everyone eventually comes to him, but that is an inference, since the poem never says why. What it does say is that "tomorrow is for ash and forgetting." Time is split in two: today belongs to the curse, and tomorrow is handed over to ash. Ash is what flowers become when they are burned, so the word quietly answers the missing bouquet in the title, and the poem swaps a living image for a dead one. "Forgetting" may be the sharper word. Ash is only what remains, but forgetting is the second loss, and cursing today looks like a way of refusing it.
The last couplet turns on a small puzzle: "and being a poet / he cannot stay an hour." Grammatically, "he" most naturally means the devil, which gives us a patient devil who is also a poet and therefore too restless to wait. That is a neat joke, because patience and poetry pull in opposite directions. But the poem doesn't pin the pronoun down, and with a title that suggests an elegy, a reader could also hear the dead person, or the speaker, in "he." Whoever it is, the explanation is oddly casual. "Being a poet" is offered as a complete reason, as if restlessness and brief visits were simply what poets do. The poem ends not on a conclusion but on someone leaving.
Sound ties the frame together more than rhyme does. There are no end rhymes, but "doubt," the last word of the first line, and "hour," the last word of the poem, share the same vowel. "Flowers" in the title, which can be said as one syllable or two, also echoes "hour." The poem therefore begins and ends on a chime, and the title it replaced comes back in the final word. The lines vary a good deal in length. Short ones ("as constant as doubt," "and being a poet") alternate with longer ones, and the final line is almost entirely plain, one-syllable speech. After the abstractions of "necessity," "patience" and "forgetting," that plainness feels like a door closing.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It turns a stock phrase from a funeral notice into a small argument about grief. It leaves out punctuation and capitals so that each couplet reads like a half-heard remark, and its ambiguities are part of the effect. For students, it is a good example of how a title can belong to the poem, and of how a few abstract words can sound personal when set beside a single, unexpected image like ash.