I sit on a truck's bed, staring at the bonfire. My cousin Skip picks some notes on a banjo, fingers fluttering half as fast as the eyes of that pretty girl he wants to take home tonight. Friends, known only from the shadows they cast by the firelight, dance with kamikaze grins splitting their faces, a skeletal sway to their shoulders. Gouts of flame flicker and flip; wood-smoke-wisps birthing, living and dying all within the crackle of a second.
I was born in a leather jacket; fists raised and bawling out some syllables that might've been "F*ck the world." Not much has changed.