At The House Party Where We Found Out Whitney Houston Was Dead

Lyrics

I am tucked in the corner, underneath a choir of arching floorboards wailing for sympathy from about four dozen relentless feet, and I am telling Jasmine that there is like, ONE song that everyone at this party knows all of the words to. I tell her that we were all born of the 80's. All born of parents who watched the revolution shove itself into a too small suit at the turn of a decade that left them in homes with welcome mats that read: "Your hearts are the lost luggage at the airport of the next generation." I tell her because of this we have earned one song we all know the words to, in the same way we have earned this breeze, sitting on top of our skin tonight and staying, the way any good apology does while we scroll through our iPods shouting out the names of 80's pop songs we both kind of love like a secret, and we keep scrolling right up until someone runs into this room that is over capacity by at least nine righteous, glowing bodies and tells us that Whitney Houston woke up dead in Los Angeles two hours ago. Our friend Amber is like five PBRs deep, and drunk enough to yell at her boyfriend for the Whitney Houston-less iPod he has been using to DJ this party. We, the war generation. The only way we know how to bury our dead is with sweat or blood or sex or anything pouring from a body to signify we were here, and the wooden floor of a basement belonging to an old house on Neil Avenue makes as good a burial ground as any, Says the small boom box now playing DJ in the center of this room, and the Whitney CD inside, pouring out of the speakers just loudly enough to let everyone in this room get a small taste of Whitney alive and young, and telling us exactly how to squeeze exactly what we are owed out of this Saturday. On a night when I don't understand where love lives in the way I will understand where love lives in coming months, but I understand there is a saxophone solo at about 3 minutes and 30 seconds into the song "How Will I Know", and I'm pretty sure love has a vacation home there, and we are all invited tonight when steam rises off of these bodies like a sacrifice and the first time I see Jasmine cry is when we are watching all of our friends convert grief into perspiration. I tell her that I see our reflection in the pools of sweat, and we look like two flowers that have never stop opening, I say, We be bloomed so wide by the end of this night won't nothing in this city be able to hold us later, we press our backs into the roof of a house that even at 4am sways with us like a metronome of well-timed memorial. The sky is unchained, and careless, and wrapped around us both like our long discarded childhoods. I look up and ask myself again why the stars have so long tolerated the audacity of clouds. I laugh loudly and tell Jasmine that it is impossible for a human being to wake up dead. She is already asleep.