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

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  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.