The Friend

For Nate Pritts The friend lives half in the grass and half in the chocolate cake, walks over to your house in the bashful light of November, or the forceful light of summer. You put your hand on her shoulder, or you put your hand on his shoulder. The friend is indefinite. You are both so tired, no one ever notices the sleeping bags inside you and under your eyes when you’re talking together about the glue of this life, the sticky saturation of bodies into darkness. The friend’s crisis of faith about faith is unnerving in its power to influence belief, not in or toward some other higher power, but away from all power in the grass or the lake with your hand on her shoulder, your hand on his shoulder. You tell the friend the best things you can imagine, and every single one of them has already happened, so you recount them of great necessity with nostalgic, atomic ferocity, and one by one by one until many. The eggbirds whistle the gargantuan trees. The noiserocks fall twisted into each other’s dreams, their colorful paratrooping, their skinny dark jeans, little black walnuts to the surface of this earth. You and the friend remain twisted together, thinking your simultaneous and inarticulate thoughts in physical lawlessness, in chemical awkwardness. It is too much to be so many different things at once. The friend brings black hole candy to your lips, and jumping off the rooftops of your city, the experience. So much confusion — the several layers of exhaustion, and being a friend with your hands in your pockets, and the friend’s hands in your pockets. O bitter black walnuts of this parachuted earth! O gongbirds and appleflocks! The friend puts her hand on your shoulder. The friend puts his hand on your shoulder. You find a higher power when you look.