eastern emptiness, western hope

your high school graduation in a muddy field in central new york. a slurry of dry metal chairs set up in lines and columns and rows so people in boots can sit in them and watch. the principal makes the same joke they make every year. people with the same different faces and bodies laugh and shift in their seats. the muddy field is churned up chewed up muddied up by the people in the boots. the chairs are empty and then filled and then empty. the chairs are folded up and together and then splayed open and then folded up and together.

your friend crashes their bike late at night on a small street in a tiny town. beers from their backpack, not fully zipped closed, spill out. they slop and slur around on peg legs trying to gather up the spilled cans of beer. some of the beer cans have burst from their fall from backpack to ground. they spray out in a foam as though celebratory. the ground is orange from the street lamps and wet from rainwater and from beer. the ground will not have much chance to become sticky.

you crash your bike riding home from a concert, blurred drunk. misjudging the cut in the sidewalk, you hit a curb and are flung over the handlebars of your bike. you land on the abrasive concrete on the uneven sidewalk in a mildly disjointed medium sized town. the ground is orange from the street lamps and wet from humidity. you laugh as you pick up your bike.

your friend is a slick of drunk. your friend is a smear of drunk. your friend is a jumble of drunk. your friend, shithammered drunk, falls off the porch into the snow. falls into a puddle on a trail in the woods. crashes the truck into the concrete post holding a sign saying ‘parking for pregnant mothers only’. you laugh at your friend.

you smuggle illegal substances on an airplane and on a day rare with sun you ride in an open skiff on open ocean water. in an inlet as calm as sober sleep you open the small tin foil package and each of you take turns wetting the tip of your finger, dipping it into the coarse crystals, sucking your finger clean. it takes maybe thirty minutes to kick in. you look at your friend, the one standing and piloting the skiff and see they are smiling. you look at your friend, the one sitting in the bow of the open skiff, with their hand wrapped around a can in which to slur chewing tobacco spit, and they are smiling. you are smiling and talking very loudly on account of the two-stroke ninety horse outboard motor and on account of the alcohol and drugs that cause you to lose countenance of your volume. later you fall down the four or five steps from the covered porch of your friend’s house, onto the gravel of their little smear of car park. they have a truck parked there and the skiff sits on the trailer having been hours ago pulled from the ocean, cleaned off of the remnants of ocean. scrubbed free of salt. your friend is meticulous even though your friend is slurring and dribbling and smeared. you are all of you laughing.

you leave early from the after-wedding parties of both of your sisters because you need to gather with your friends until you each until you all disappear. you’d rather not leave and you’d rather not have come in the first place. you’d rather not leave. you’d rather want to be. you sit alone in your boat on psychotropic medicine. a glass of still tea cooling on a flat surface. rain dribbling onto your decks. waiting for the glass to cool enough so it can be handled. the harbor today is exceptionally pregnant with trash. dead fish float belly white belly up glowing shining belly up offered up to the sky. the tone of the day is one that is hopeful. the mood of the day is pregnant with hope.