Invitations to “the party” come late

if at all, tangle in speculative 

networks of recrimination, ingrown 

fatalism, that one must either be

or bring a child to defer, rather 

to conceptualize last words besides 

inconsequential last words; winnowing 

to uselessness, the decisive estate

of bar soap; this and each pulsing moment

a lamentation for its own passage. 

Mortality practice, for those of us

who’ve relinquished little or less; votive 

chaos to ratify in advance just

how inconvenient the gathering hurt.