Ode To My Friends
“Friendship” is one of those words drenched in golden kindergarten tinsel, strangulated by it in fact, for such adornment hasn’t fit the term nor the crime since you were peeing your pants at the Halloween costume march.
“Friends” is much the same; one of those pills that we all swallow and often gets lodged in our throats and scratches up our vocal cords on the way down because no water is enough to swallow the sizable lump that is a thorny, petalled cliche.
But friendship, that hollow bone, that massive shell is liable to fill right up to the brim with everything God promises, and your mother promises, and your flickering birthday candles promise, and some of the better books and better dreams promise; the very same hidden idiom that your glittering few memories -- the ones that drifted just an inch higher than the rest and the settling dust -- spell when you place them side by side and upright.
Sometimes when you forget about the beaming, cape-dawning, pettifogging, building rappelling, hair gelling, basketball slamming, baby catching, volcano luging heroes and heroins and remember that lives can in fact be saved by the drop of a New York penny or a hand on your shoulder, the bones of the word friend starts to fill with that magical marrow.
It can be easy to forget life, for what is life but a container; an interminable ocean draining at its mouth, at the close, to the river Styx? We swim in its murky waters and choke on it’s salty froth, and we go blind. And sometimes it picks you up in the undertow and slams you merciless into its floor, into a rock, or on occasion, pelts them at you like the shadowed audience who’s seen through the thin veil and scoffed at your twisted visage, and you take the blows and you go blinder still, and then a rarer few times, if your lucky, someone puts a hand on your shoulder, and it is in those moments that you remember it all: the light glinting off the surf, the park you walked through when you were young with the big puddle, that really big one, on the tennis court, and all the times you nearly drowned, and all the people who have come to rest their tender feet beside your ears, and every finger that has drawn a print onto your cheek, and jumping on the bed and the Mexican midnight, and inflatable schoolyard import, and coconuts in Canada, and eating popcorn until two a.m. to the gentle backbeat of “American Psycho”, and broken promises and calloused fractures and bones, and sticks, and moans, and throwing pinecones, and downstairs principal’s office illustrated reprimands, and kept promises, and staying awake in the church until the night bleeds its restless blood onto the hands of tomorrow morning like warpaint and from the mist at dawn a phantom emerges and embraces you as you all embrace each other - one too many hands, and soccer blood and mud, and running for so long but you weren’t by yourself after all even though you thought you were because the shadows ran with you, and even the nights you shouldn’t remember that you traded for the secret at the bottom of the glass and then, god dammit, the bottom of the barrel because a triumphant man doesn’t know when to stop, right?
I love my friends. In moments when everything is stripped away, all noise falls like feathers from the bird to bless someone else, and all light has gone somewhere else to rest too, because even that frenetic bastard can burn too bright and too hot and needs some chicken soup and a shadow in which to shed a few tears and digest its few regrets… it is in that stillness that the quiet whisper that still remains - the truth - can be heard. I love my friends.
-- Schenectady, 2022