THERE’S THIS THING THAT HAPPENS TO YOU

In high school my popular friend died in a fire

I finally got to share something with the cool kids

and that something was grief, and the struggle

to feel right in the face of it. The playoffs started

we all wrote K.R. on our game shoes

and got killed in the first round

The final days before graduation:

my college roommate breaks his neck

We’d been tight, as freshmen, but it’d been so long

and now in recovery here was this yawning gap

between him and me, between the kind of friend

I decided he needed and thought I could be

Bombing the hill through the back half

of my 20s, freshly in love and riding the rush

of getting paid real money for something I made

I fell off my skateboard and onto my head

and woke up weeks later having lost what

would turn out to be the next 5 years

Sometimes a sinkhole just opens up

and swallows whole the big ideas on your list

Wherefore art the crux when the borders be in flux?

When happiness rubs shoulders with the abyss

What used to be the whole point no longer is