SONG OF THE DAY: Party Wit Pop Smoke

The smell of barrel fire on fresh clothes, meaning that $20 t-shirt you bought from your boy who has “a clothing line” that took five reminder texts despite your completely laid back nature to get him to remember to drop it off, that you figured was only for weekend fresh fits, but you somehow found yourself wandering the tracks beneath the interstate bridges and found fellow souls of deep-patterned solitude standing around a metal barrel lifted off the ground by two sideways cinderblocks (safety first), so you kicked it with them, because fireside ciphers are incomparable – the free styling of human words from your barely conscious brain as flames suck oxygen and flash the promise of cleansing it all and archiving all the world’s wrongs into ash so that we can begin again, freshly, and see if we don’t get it more right than last time this next time. The flames hide the stank of pallet scraps and found volunteer kindling and empty cans and taillight covers that floated down from the heavens above, and the barrel fire smell of all of our manufactured plastic ass existence blends into the fibers of your fresh $20 shirt from your boy’s line, and it’s like the DNA inside your body, full of the smoke from your pop and his pop and the pops before that, plus the moms… oh fuck the glorious persistent moms that had to endure all those explosive self-destructive pops and try to hold shit together just well enough that the family tree grew out into you, and you’re stills standing here, a goddamn wreck of human existence but wearing that fresh shirt and the same grey-scale camouflage cargo shorts, freestyling those same prayers you’ve been freestyling for years, falling on deaf gods who never hear dirtgods. And that fresh shirt meant for Saturday afternoon cookouts that don’t happen because quarantine feels permanent is relegated to long solitary walks of pimping through the wasteland, and the shirt stinks of burned plastic and ragweed blunts and to be honest, of you. The freshness is worn off, but you tell yourself it’s still fresh, you’re still fresh, there’s still hope, keep walking, keep freestyling those prayers to the gods above, dreams only come true if you naively keep believing in them.