to be a Caring Bridge.
That song wasn’t written
to become a prayer;
a cry.
Three, two, one.
Her life was dependent on her.
Not five machines.
Her throat, veins, lungs
were flesh, tissues,
not the ones that lay crumpled
in brittle defeat, next to an unmade bed.
Not plastic tubes.
A stereo system substituting her heartbeat
as an auto-tuned hum.
Three, two, one.
Seventeen isn’t supposed to look like 90.
Not nails marring hands in white fists,
white linens, white coats, white rooms.
“Don’t cry” written on a white board.
Not a blackened salt stained collar
of a t-shirt.
Seventeen shouldn’t be eyes
drained of a fire that once gave off
the light needed to see,
warmth necessary to feel.
Skin blue with fatigue
doesn’t belong here.
Three, two, one.
Clear.
Seventeen was the introduction,
the pregame for eighteen,
the hello to the see you later.
A Pinterest wall of dances, graduation, plans,
cheap promises.
The kind of insignificant significance
that is life before living begins.
Periods don’t go at the beginning of a sentence.
It should be a prologue, a semicolon.
Not a eulogy.
Not for her,
for seventeen.