Most poems about death treat him as a visitor nobody wants. Here the speaker does the inviting, and does it in an unlikely way: by gardening. "I always grew flowers for death / hoping he would show." The word "always" turns this into a lifelong habit, and "show" gives it the tone of a hopeful host waiting for a guest who keeps cancelling.
The search is full of irony. She looks in "the flourishing woods," "through the green trees," and "up on the highest peak," places that are alive, open and high, as if death were a rare bird. When he finally turns up, it is "at the foot of a burnt tree," a spot that already belongs to him. She hunted in the wrong landscape, and he came to the one that suited him. When he doesn't appear, she says, "I just chose to work myself to sleep." The line can mean exhaustion from labour, or something quieter and darker, a kind of dying by degrees. Either way, the verb "chose" matters, because even in disappointment she stays in charge.
The form is free verse with no regular metre, and the line lengths do much of the work. The first stanza is clipped and fragmentary, with short lines that read like steps up a mountain. Then comes the stumbling "The months went came and went," where the verbs crowd together so that arrivals and departures blur. Whether the slip is deliberate or not, it works as an image of time losing its shape. The next line, "But I still continued to plant flowers for a man I've never seen with my own eye," runs on without a pause. "Still continued" doubles the stubbornness, and the long, breathless line makes her persistence feel physical. Calling death "a man" gives him a body and a personality. The flowers become something like gifts for a sweetheart she has never met.
Because the poem is mostly unrhymed, its one clear rhyme lands hard: "bony grin" and "I win." The rhyme links the skeleton's smile to her triumph and gives the moment the snap of a playground taunt. She doesn't shout it, either. She "flashed him a smile and whispered," which keeps the exchange private and playful, like two players who both know the rules. What she has won is left open. It might be the waiting game, since he did come, or it might be the fact that she isn't afraid of him.
The last stanza softens in sound as well as meaning. "Bloom," "lose" and "you" share a long, rounded vowel, and the poem ends on "you," as if the whole thing had been addressed to him. The verb "allowed" is striking too: "As I allowed the tree to bloom." She doesn't beg or fight. She simply permits life to return to a burnt trunk, and that casual authority is her victory. Death laughs and looks at her "with his mysterious eyes," an odd detail for a creature with a "bony grin," since it gives a skeleton the warmth of a human gaze. His reply, "I love to lose to you," can be read several ways. It might be flirtation, or the one contest Death is glad to forfeit, or a hint that his patience means he loses only for now. The poem doesn't choose.
The title is written in upside-down characters that read "psycho" when turned around. I take this as a comment on the whole scene. To an onlooker, someone who plants gardens for death and smiles at skeletons might look unhinged, and the flipped lettering suggests a world turned over, where fear becomes courtship. The poem answers the label by letting its "psycho" win the game.
Nothing is certain here about who wrote the poem or when, so its significance has to come from the page. It takes one of the oldest subjects in poetry and swaps dread for a game of mutual affection, using plain, conversational language. The loose punctuation and the slip in "went came and went" give it an unpolished, confessional feel, which suits a speaker who is more tender than the title suggests.