What Do Lilacs Smell Like?

[tectak]

lilacs sweetened the air,
or rather the canned scent they shove
into bottles and pump
into motel rooms. As we are in mild it would not be becoming to get all pedantic, especially over a loosely constructed  piece of cut-up prose. As there is no attempt at meter ( nothing wrong with that), or rhyme (nothing wrong with that), or the created use of a central metaphor(nothing wrong with that), or the helpful use of capitals to denote the start of a new sentence(nothing wrong with that) we are left with nothing to crit. The musing message is all in this sort of work; the cameo, the vignette must be crisp and you all but make it work. Sadly, for this crit, you fall early in your opening gambit and this leaves the reader unsure of the whole thing. You see, you make a syntactical error in the very first sentence. Consider your two contra statements, "Lilacs sweetened the air..." Fine, a sentence. Complete and sufficient unto itself. Now the contra. Read it. "(..or rather) the canned scent they (who?) shove (shove a scent?) into bottles and  pump into (into twice) motel rooms" . What is missing? You do not complete the contra. You must say the "does" word to make the contras fit. Lilacs sweetened the air, or should I say the artificial scent pumped into the room (did/does).
Final but hopefully non-pedantic point. What relevance to the rest of the piece is this opener? It is as though you began with a portentous rant against air-fresheners then got distracted by a fly on the ceiling. Please, I am NOT suggesting that there IS no connection, but that the metaphor flower dies before it blooms...lilacs do that.
we turned on classic rock
to make us feel defiant
and drank bourbon because it
tastes like sorrow.
we danced in the dark,
too drunk to turn on the lights,
or maybe just afraid of what we might see.