Growing

We used to cut right down to the dirty undies,
joke about old farmers and moaning sheep,
bitch out empires through television screens
like we had omnipotent voice boxes
that could blow Vanna White’s dress off.
When we gave a beating to the lug head who
slugged your mother, we swore each other
to secrecy, with spit and blood. We didn’t put up
fronts when we got dumped, failed history class,
get embarrassed about my father’s drinking,
your sister never eating. It was all there for us,
open and pink, crust and love. We even
talked about fucking each other once,
drunk on beer and huffing shoe cleaner.
You cupped my breast like you were fishing
an earring out of the garbage disposal.
We decided it best to be what we were,
climbed into the back of your brother’s
pickup truck, laid shoulder to shoulder,
slept intoxicated and warm.

Seven years spent gutting fish in Alaska,
you came back, saw me in front of the drugstore,
saw me with my wife. You turned your back to me,
I thought you were going to spin around and say
tah duh it’s me. Your back didn’t say a thing.
Now, you pray for me, say you’ve changed,
into a better person, saying I can’t be this way,
holding a sign saying fags go to hell. When I tell
my kids about you, I use another name,
sometimes Brian, sometimes Will,
tell them you’re in Ireland goat herding,
sloshed on Guinness asleep in a green pasture,
a place we once pledged we go after high school,
after we fled this town, like many pledges,
impossible pledges, like banging the old tits
off the first lady, mundane pledges
about fixing an engine, raising a bulldog,
pledges about friendship and time, pledges
reduced to an old joke carved on a tree, the punch
line hacked away by birds, piece by piece.