"Things I'd Still Do" by Dré Pontbriand

Get in vans with strangers: a Palo-Santo heavy Chevy G20 with a sonnet-spilling prophet; a red 70’s Volkswagen shaggin' wagon with three long-haired surfers headed South; a fuzzy pink and purple pimped out festival-goer’s fantasy stocked with the best candy—one taste and I make-out with God. Talk myself out of a felony on one side of the border, have my first lucid dream on the other. Skinny dip a bioluminescent shoreline with a nowhere-bound time -traveller, his touch the lightning that strikes me sober, makes me want to remember. Take LSD blessed by a Mayan shaman on a Panamanian beach. Find out the only love I’ve ever known isn’t free—my softened gaze on strangers spinning around me, I love them not because they’re mine but because they never will be. Get all my shit stolen and backpack for three months without a backpack. Dance callouses onto the bottoms of my feet. When strangers barge into the van, I learn that boundaries don’t need to be barbed wire fences, a purple velvet rope is all you need. The prophet heads North and Tara asks Are you sure he’s not the one who stole all your shit? Nope. Hand what’s left of me to a golden-haired dreamer who hymns any instrument he holds. Change my mind about building a home in the gap between his front teeth. Leave him carving our initials in the rearview like the one before him left me. Fall in love during a solar eclipse. Let a wizard undress my notions of pleasure in the stolen darkness at mid-day, melt into the world of tantra without knowing what it means. Yes, a nameless rose does smell as sweet. I’d forego the forever my college sweetheart promised when he said he’d ask my dad, like I was an 18th century commodity. I’d handpick the same bouquet of brief eternities, still slam on the gas pedal—my rose-coloured windshield shattered to pieces when I travel to the final frontier to find the lights in his Northern eyes out of order those nights. Kintsugi: the Japanese art of repairing broken items with gold lacquer; freesias swooning over the fallen vase—her slow dance of shimmering scars. Given the chance, I’d still fling myself off the shelf, bless the falls that broke me golden. ————————————– Dré Pontbriand called us from Antigua & Barbuda. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems