Can't stand up so she sits down left barely awake
Red in the face and hair still wet from the lake
Eyes scan weakly across her friends
Of middle class B+ college freshmen
Gone and moved away, why else would they stay?
They'll all be gone too one day
But the gang was all together again
And to us, it all seemed alright then
How dizzy you must have been
Rests head down, silent in her inhibitions
Low in these thoughts leaves this high indecision
What will you say next?
I don't think even you could guess
And alike; my childhood friend, no words are spoken
But not lost in his inhibitions- lost in deep thought
Reading symbols in the bright red orange flickering mass
Waiting too for this moment's pass
Some people are complex in a way you can't experience
Their otherness sees me not as I see them
Reality fostered for each facet of self
Who's life am I connecting?
Who else?
As she reaches into the flame and pulls out her image
Of VSCO posts and road trips to her family's 2nd backwoods cabin
And fake Polaroids tucked neat into the back of her phone
How oddly gracefully she moves
Like a deer, but unable to run away from all this company
And all unseeing of her own blind feral beauty
Semi-boldly still, onward she is feeling
No sense of fear in this action, this moment
Unprepared and unremembering but present still, no less than us
Back quickly from the flame and pass it off
And I wonder what sleeps in the empty wooden cabin across the lake
And I think about who lived there and what they did and why
What was lost to leave paradise?
He is still the young boy, now with half a college education
Has a car, lots of friends, and a mild disposition
He is looking up at the semi-clear nightly sky where they light has found its next reflector
The light that has found him that came from a star that has long since died before our parents, our country and earth, before he or I
The star that in a way is still pulsing its creation
Despite unrememberance in its faded constellation
How humbling this astral chart can be
How perfect in its unchanging pattern
When they looked up long ago; the same
Making stories of the glow
Not shining for us, not anyone, but just so
It's the apathy I find to comfort in a place of so much consequence
Stargazing with its great desolipsition
I came from nothing but I have grown since now
I came from nothing but one day I'm passed around
Like a bottle of cinnamon whisky going from mouth to mouth
Causes fist fights and words spoken loud
And to nothing I may return as he gets up and into the air
And spills the red vodka bottle everywhere
It runs over stones and sinks into this tired ground before a new one is passed around
Fire turns from novel to the centre of the night where it illuminates these faces, sunken eyes, a new girl where she is singing all the words to the only real country song she likes
It all comes again to this
Fire on the dark and starry canvas, the glow into abyss
They start the worst played crib game this place will ever see
Open eyes slow now count to 15
It all moves slow beneath the screen, as gentle as it could have been
And slowly now, they retreat
To their houses of rubber and plastic and steel
Cusping on another day, a morning vacant of this consequence
And at this end we were somewhere in between of a long-tired joke and those tourist magazines
2 stories collided, one infesting the other with its Honda Fits and birthday parties and instant vegan TV suppers
And I was there too, just unpresent in this action
I didn't have to choose not to belong
And I wonder what looms on the grey and green mountain across the lake
And I think about who lived there and what they did and why
What was lost to leave paradise?
