Shotgunning another one of our bong-rip philosophies,
we debated if we were already living in the Brave New World,
possibly as Betas. We determined that quantum mechanics

proved that we were gods, somehow, though my best friend
couldn’t light his lighter telepathically. He tried his best,
but his face turned redder than a red homunculus bottle. So

we sat in our diner and flipped our creamers around our thumbs,
drank our black coffee for no less than five hours and smoked
our cigarettes until he lost his apartment. His father was definitely

paying for it. No one worked much that summer. The thought
of high school itself was a shriveled crust of a slice of pizza
lost behind the refrigerator and his apartment smelled like it.

We named all of his cockroaches Steve and when one
would slither down the wall we would cheer and welcome
him as we had welcomed all of the Steves before him. We stole

shopping carts and raced them down the big Landis Woods hill.
One of us would lay face down on the bottom rack and steer
with his shoes. We crashed at the bottom every time.

I crashed onto his cigarette-burnt couch, my head spinning
like an up-ended wheel. We crashed our lit fists into each other’s
faces and stumbled through the grass and back to the diner.