It's good to be young here (19/25)

​It’s good to be young here
It’s good to take a picture and flick the last cigarette butt at his shadow
It’s good to trip over a skateboard and promise you’d used to be good at it and swig the last mouthful of daylight and let it coat your throat
It’s good to grab the rope swing and forget to let go
     and let go and walk around with bruises on the backs of your thighs for days after you toweled off
     and almost died on the hike back to the car
It’s good to fall in love and out of love with the idea of it
It’s good to overheat your car and have to walk
It’s good to forget and not mean to forget but the walkways and stones that built the town are the sleeping bones of everything the dead people hoped you’d remember
 
and then you heard that song on the radio and remembered
 
It’s good to fight for someone else’s life
and explain to the elders why it’s good to do it
It’s good to eat dinner and call everything that tastes right “mamaw’s cooking”
It’s good to learn how to love the voice of the banjo
It’s good to tell your secret and make it our secret
It’s good to fall silent and in love with the way the clouds have pressed their faces against the necks of the mountains
It’s good to buy too much soap from that woman who looks tired
It’s good to bless the kitten that sneezed and now won’t stop following you
It’s good to sip it from the jar and want to spit it out
 
it’s good to hear that song and remember
 
It’s good to pretend that you belong until no one is looking at you anymore
It’s good to tip extra
It’s good to learn to bake when you don’t know a better way to say thank you
It’s good to have gone through so much shit that they mistake you for one of them
    and the old lady insists that you are no younger than twenty-seven
    even though God told you that you'd be dead long before then
It’s good to let the dogs lick you and worry about the rash later
It’s good to trust him tonight and never pick up tomorrow
It’s good to see a dead deer by the road and feel nothing
It’s good to stop the car to help the turtle cross
It’s good to ask for a ghost story and regret it later that night
 
it’s good to sing that song when you remember
and want to forget

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