There is a party for a dead girl at Maple and Third,
Grating, metal gnashing and siren blaring vibrations cause the leaves strewn in the gutters to tremble,
The hollows of trees force their lips downwards when over indulgent products of the narcissist generation open up their stomachs to the black lake pavement,
A dank trepid pool of infinite nothing, going to nowhere, trailing onwards from blank space,
Her name is hiding in the miniscule slivers between teeth, sloshing around in the watered-down foam of red plastic cups, the cliché that is required by law, in the shared confides of interlocked lips, warm and desperate to cling onto anything,
No one knew her, but she was the conversation of the evening,
Her name whispered like white noise static, beating through synapses and gyrating hips,
Details that seemed infinitesimally important, because they are a limited edition ordeal are shared with gesticulates and misconstrued meanings after people’s own fashion,
I bumped into her in the hall and we had a moment I swear-
She said that test was going to be the death of her, who would have known-
She wore black on Wednesday-
The pastor at the funeral with his pathetic basset hound face, and his ceremonial draping dripping off his arms like white paint on canvas,
Tried too piece together meaning by stitching together over wrung and vapid phrases over her tooth white coffin, white and virgin like her life,
Tragedies have lessons-
Everything happens for a reason-
She is in a better place-
She’s an angel now-
Death crowds the scuffed pews in a somber black mass of starched linen pants and veiled hats,
People are throwing dead flowers to a dead girl,
Cutting their best out of their tyrannically preserved gardens, snatching and cutting short the growth of another beautiful thing in the world,
The irony could people laugh if they thought it was appropriate,
Everyone gives condolences over platters of vegetables and deviled eggs courtesy of the neighbors,
They slip beneath cool petal sheets and close their eyes and count their blessings,
There is a party for a dead girl on Maple and Third,
Hosted by the dead themselves, ghosts are in bedrooms trying to cling onto semi-alive souls and are sharing witty antidotes near drooping houseplants,
The shutters shiver, and shoulders shake,
Not one reason being the same.