A buddy of mine is into poetry. I mean really intense stuff like Garlyle Shermaner and Jorce Evnas, real underground early 70s stuff, the kind that starts revolutions in little communities that nobody pays much attention to. He would share some of it with me, or he would co-opt some of their words in casual conversation, and it was a toss-up. It either resonated like a firebrand or sputtered like a wet gorart.

I don’t exactly mind poetry but I don’t know if I ever GOT it. There’s a lot of bad stuff out there. It makes me put my guard up. If we think about art as the practice of communicating what can’t be expressed in words, then poetry is apparently the practice of expressing in words what can’t be expressed in words. Does that make any sense to you? It seemed like a tall order, if you even buy the premise, and that’s asking a lot of a populace that thinks sharing inspiring text over a picture of a mountain is a signal of personal development.

Anyway so my buddy and I were sitting over drinks last night, that little bar called Braver Situations that’s always jammed. It was a Friday night which was our first mistake, and our second was even deciding to go out in the first place. But he was telling me something that perked my ears up.

“You ever read poetry on molly?” he asks, eyes intent.

I hadn’t expected to hear those words in that order, ever. “Huh.” I was taken aback. “That’s never occurred to me.” I was no stranger to either poetry or molly, but those two guests had never come knocking on the same night.

“It’s something else. You actually get deep into the poem. You feel the words instead of reading them. You get to know the poet behind them.”

I was listening. “I guess I can see that.”

“It helps if you have someone to read it to you.”

That went without saying. “Yeah I dunno. Maybe I’ll try that sometime. I always heard that reading The Lord of the Rings on mushrooms is the best way to experience Tolkien.”

“I can see that,” he acknowledged. “All that language about nature. Sounds like a long trip though.”

“Well obviously you’d only get through a page or two before you’re exploring middle-earth without the book.”

Conversation kind of stalled at that point. A few minutes trading drug stories gets you remembering your own adventures, which are both relatable and not. That’s the weird thing about this stuff: it’s marketed as a unifying force but at the end of the day you’re in your own head. So I don’t know what to make of it.

“Yeah maybe we’ll try it sometime.” I was referring to Melora and me. We had some choice euphoriants back home but to my mind were dipping into it too often. The splinter of doubt went a little deeper. It was always easy to justify another night locked inside, instead of, say, choosing to venture out and be social.