Too true, so many people show up at funerals (and weddings, and retirement parties, and everything else) for the sake of appearances only.

I like the phrase "dirt blanket." Harsh, confrontational, true.

Lovely oxymoron, threaded irony, and rampant second quessing. You use words well.

If this is what you do in five minutes...I'm afraid of what would happen if we gave you an hour! You'd take over the world (you've already taken over my mind) with your words. Beautiful and dakr piece. Lovely.

Well-written and darkly affecting. I like the formatting; it adds a lot.

Beautiful.

I love the styling; the use of parenthesis is done with care and thought, not just adding it in with no need, randomly; you let the words speak and flow naturally and I'd kill for a format as good as your poem is structured in this.

It really is quite pretty.

I adore these line (because they are I'm-Going-To-Die-From-The-Pretty):

"She died yesterday." - Because - OH! I love the blunt-edge to it, how non-melodramatic it is and is just straight forward, "just the facts, ma'm". Loved it as an opening, entirely too mood-setting for it's too short of lenghth.

Oh. And I'm not at all dry-eyed by this line: "The funeral was the typical dry-eyed tearjerker. (plenty of stick-on tears, but a noticeable lack of misery--maybe he lost the invitation?) But it was a funeral (/carnival), andeveryone had some perfect part to play." - Goddamn. Beautiful. Stanza.

Loved it, entirly too pretty for a subject I know too well (funerals aren't as depressing as they used to be and that stanza has my sentimants exactly on the last one I went to).

Lovely poem, I find little fault in this.

~* Noelle