All of us were boys, feral and feisty, some with bodies
and others with only the idea of them,
the rumor of how breasts felt, how a girl tasted,
how to pull from a cigarette
so the smoke rolled out like mist
over the harbor. All of us were teenage fogs,
low pressure systems
that rolled in unannounced,
materializing in rotation to hit the blunt,
to skip eighth period
and practice fighting on the JV soccer field.
And like this, November pulled darkness
over the trees and we descended
into basements to do mushrooms
and fuck with strangers on the internet.
To blur ourselves blue in the glow of a chatroom,
the haze of 4chan & YouPorn.
So when spring came we were flickers.
Standing in a still frozen field,
encircling a stump, we flipped a hammer
and slammed it towards some ancient nails,
beating out or pinning down
some part of ourselves. Some quiet
that made Malcolm retreat to the garage
and emerge with a hatchet, that made him gouge
repeatedly, as the porchlights blinked on
one by one, as we backed away like astronauts
from a planet we loved but knew was lost.