We Do Not Speak of It

I will drink down every last abandoned champagne glass. Somebody has to push in the chairs and collect the utensils of mismatched sizes. There is no point in figuring where to place a dessert spoon now. Allow me play custodian to the preemptive cheer that wiser sensibilities smiled upon as hubris. How could they not have understood? Their guests RSVPed from inside an active volcano. We sold a mendacious hope. It is an odious habit of desperate persons to make a festival out of blind projection. Look around you. Embroidered scarves, commemorative rings, and crystal paperweights inscribing a victory that never happened marking a day that simply came and went like scheduled bussing. It's fine, half of this stuff did not make it out of the boxes. Even ones decorated with colored stickers of expedited shipping became makeshift tables for ice buckets. Complementary bread sat in open trays long enough to stale and chip. There is nothing left to do with it other than pop balloons and feed migrating birds. We killed and sauteed half a farm to feed no show after no show. Yet I don't have it in me to scold them. They needed a day. Something to celebrate. Communities die without rallying points of achievement. I've seen it. It's like they forget the name of their city in favor of some memorable body of water. Then the street on which they live becomes a constellation of shops and businesses. Before you know it, their living space is just a wilderness peppered with stop signs. At that stage there is no rented hall, banquet, or live performance that can make us see each other again.