Congratulations Joe

In life they'd never have looked his way again.
Two years removed from high school, most moved on,
knew him when they'd known him, and that was that.
Now, sitting pretty and serene in his lacquered pine box,
they flocked to him. The only thing his parents heard
was two thousand versions of the same
fifteen-second pithy one-and-dones they'd all prepared in advance.

If he hadn't been dead, if that drunken fool
had chosen two seconds earlier to notice the red light,
they'd all be blissfully ignorant that Joe still existed.
But because he plowed into a car
and careened through the guardrail into a tree,
the shatterproof glass of his car doing a wonderful job
of keeping the mess nicely contained and off the corner shop's front lawn,
everybody who had ever known the name woke up and realized
he'd touched their lives somehow.
I wanted to scream.

But I bit my tongue, used that pain to add a touch of credence
to my fifteen-second one-and-done to his parents, and that was that.
Because it was really the biggest insult of all:
Two thousand voices saying congratulations Joe,
with your life you couldn't change a thing,
but in death you find your greatest accomplishment.