For life

He was your man, a lanky kid

with Old English sheepherder hair,

black like the color of night

when we all piled on the bus

for another race. But no one could steal

you from being my confidant,

prankster. At first he was skittish like a colt,

all legs and arms trying to grow

into an Arabian stallion, black hair flying.

But three friends can only play so many rounds

of Nertz before the conversation opens

like flood gates, laughter trailing behind

our sentences like punctation. We ran

in groups of three—and I never had to reinvent the wheel.

But it didn’t settle in between my lungs

in the fleshy pink box we call a heart

until we went on a walk, just the two of us—

the boyfriend and the girlfriend’s friend.

Swagger replaced with raw truth and honesty

as ripe and rare as huckleberries.

I saw it in your eyes, the fear that no friendship

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withstands the rapids and flash floods of brutal time.

But when I said friends for life, I meant it. Mean it.

The actors guild

Cliches and cliques, clinking glasses like old lovers.

Biceps bulging on the dudes who could only speak

with sentences that ended in ball. Football, baseball,

soccer ball, tennis ball, how I loathed them all.

The chicks would chatter by the feed,

painted fingernails like claws, eyeing

the preening roosters. The church kids

wearing the buttons off guitar hero—

nothing heroic about hitting preprogrammed

notes to songs with no soul. Nerds who preached

the mantras of Newton but who had never bothered

to eat an apple. How cliche,

grouping together in an epic ballad

to accomplish the most impressive nothing.

We were the misfits, an actors guild

who played the parts cast aside and left over

like last year’s Halloween fare.

I would chat tech with the would-be

programmer while our resident hippy

spouted rainbows and peace signs

like the high school water fountain after gym class.

The other two were chemists,

scientists, daredevil chefs concocting the next

nuclear weapon. One kid to mix, one to drink,

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Sometimes the guild would move as one,

shifting from the tables to the books, erupting

in laugher as Myth and Magic proclaimed its wares.

Be sure to leave the actor crest on the library computers

—thirty flying toasters proudly taking impossible flight.