If we were the kind of friends who unironically
raised our glasses in toasts,
I would give one to the generation too comforted by the ease
of a honeybee in the plaintively nonexistent mind
of a tulip

To the generation, or at least its subset
that wrongly feels representative, who stumble drunkenly
or maybe just tiredly out of tents
to **** in the view of their friends, who are still at the fire
because the tent was too cold

To those who did raise their glasses in a toast
on New Year’s Eve at what felt, with the ball drop
not screening in luddite protest, enough like midnight.
Beginning with “dear friends” and a couple laughs;
concluding with “now let’s get ****** up” and
a couple more

To those who proceeded
as directed, clinking their shot-glasses
and swigging them back. If only because
they were not tulips.

And when I opened my eyes, the whole
of the night sky was white-washed—even one hundred
and five miles wasn’t enough to keep the lights
of metropolitan Columbus from blocking out
the stars. In my drunkenness, there lying
by the lakeside, I perceived the three-dimensionality
of space, and at first, I was awestruck by that vision,
but then one of the stars started shooting, as the astronomers
had predicted, and with my mouth still wide open, I realized
that the shooting star was just a moth, and not
the dust of a comet. The three-dimensional vision I’d perceived
an illusion, the picture dissolved, and there I was
again basking in the two-dimensional darkness
that even one hundred and five miles couldn’t make black.

If I ever get addicted to cigarettes,
it will be because of you, Mike—
the screenwriter and smoker from Miami who I met
amidst the gentle crashing of the calm waves. It’s not
that I needed to smoke to accent the stars,
already so powerful in their summer sky without haze, but
I did need the smoke to accent you, Mike, to
hear about the time you climbed a mountain
where the air was so cold and the wind so fierce
that in your tent, your body created an atmosphere
dialectical in its warmth and surreal rain. When I
cough up phlegm in the morning, I’ll be thinking of you, Mike,
and as that brownish yellow glob slides
down the thin metal drain, I know I’ll think
that if I get addicted to cigarettes
because of you, Mike,
then it won’t be such a bad thing.

From hungover breakfast to hungover breakfast
the collection of words escaping from my throat in that diner
has remained pretty much the same. This afternoon
I went there healthy and for lunch. I found
that they have a pretty good lunch menu, and
across the way, those echoes of all my former selves,
most haunting in the sameness of their
"I can't believe what I did last night"s and
"I wish we could just work things out"s, seemed
a little foolish, I guess. It was spicy, the veggie burger.

We threw stones at an ancient cliff-face
hoping that the whole thing might crumble.
Thousands of years undone by us
because then we are a part of this.
Then we aren’t insignificant.

We threw stones at a wall of stones,
and we were at if for hours
searching for the perfect projectiles—
bricks when we could find them.
It was cathartic and exhausting and good.

We threw stones,
and when we were done, covered in mud,
we all went to our separate houses to shower
and put on new pants to get ready for
our dates that night. We threw stones
at nothing really.

We were just throwing stones.

I guess there's a lot of comfort in the fact
that if I don't still love you in ten years,
I'll be happy about it. This road
looks the same as it did when I drove up here in August
but now that I've come full circle, I've broken
out of my own gravity, and this road
is pointed in a new direction.

The world played me in reverse
every song I know by heart
and in that striking unfamiliar tune
my face was smashed down in the dirt
where I had a half-second thought
that maybe it's these bugs I like
and maybe it's not you, but then the
rain splashed down so loudly
that it made puddles in my shoes,
and my body's just an ashtray
whenever it's used. I feel my heart
pouring out my skin, and out my mouth
comes the swarm of words and mud
once locked so tightly by the thought
of your lips as the barriers to mine, so let's
roll these chunks of mud around my yard,
we can make a whole mud-man
with a rotting carrot for its nose,
the stench there to remind us of
all that we once knew.