On Being Tagged in Newly Posted Pictures of a Dead Friend

Technology and death, never a good combination

They never should have memorialized your page,

it filled up so quickly with strangers and their uneasy need

to burrow their way into tragedy

and still,

here you are again on my Newsfeed

There are our hands, there is the sun

Usually, new photos make me eager

So here they do, again-

But-

Oh.

Well, look anyway, I suppose

(right? What is the etiquette

for online regret?)

This is the last 4/20 we had

the sun was never so bright,

you thought

and we had three hundred and sixty-five best friends

in a circle on the grass

in front of the gardens and the river

You’d stayed up all night to lick skins off a full pack of cigars

and we fed you juice in the early morning to soothe

your tongue

I don’t remember whether you kept your shirt on

I don’t know why I feel like I should remember

Thanks Facebook, you’re warping this

Now in my memory, things slant

They end differently

I made a big bowl of bruschetta

That made its way all the way around

The security guards came to smoke with us

We smoked twenty bowls, we talked about tattoos

and philosophy and skipped down the hill to

put our feet into the fountain

So many kids were laughing and taking pictures

None of us had secrets and we all got naked

We reconciled,

Nothing bad ever happened in the world

You lived, of course