Epigraph:
LET CONVERSATIONS CEASE;
LET LAUGHTER FLEE.
THIS IS THE PLACE
WHERE DEATH REJOICES
IN HELPING THE LIVING.
— Inscription at the entrance
to the New York City Morgue


She was just a little girl,
and she tried to make the scene,
but they threw her down and she died —
broken on the pavement,
naked and alone,
with her beads around her neck.


She had these amber beads,
and she wanted to “make the scene,”
but it was the wrong scene
and the wrong time
and nobody loved her,
and nobody cared,
and she died there, on Mott Street,
with her beads around her neck.


From a little shabby house
near a cornfield in Ohio
with a barn
and a horse that died
and a couple of old trucks out back —
She wanted to be “where it's at.”
She was only playing a game;
they buried her three weeks ago —
she would have been fourteen today.


It was a hot night in July
when they hitchhiked to New York.
In Washington Square Park
everybody was making it
even the mosquitoes were making it
and they bit her as she slept.
But she wanted “kicks,”
so she went off with two men.
And they found her, broken on the stone,
with her beads around her neck.


Her parents, they worked hard,
and they ate their bitter bread;
her father, he drank and he fought —
he'd been in trouble with a girl
and was in jail last year.
It broke him, too.
“I felt like I just got
picked up and dropped,
broke like a glass.”


They buried her three weeks ago;
and Death cannot rejoice
that she made his scene, —
for she was just a little girl,
and they broke her and she died
with her beads around her neck.