My Friend   I thought about you once — the crunch that must have rung your bell — hello! impact! — compressing the plastic, glass, and steel of your rust- bucket beater’s front end, the plastic, glass, and steel of the cop car’s rear end, and what they must have found back in the trunk, a shoe box with all that junk inside, pure, uncut, wrapped up with ribbons, yellow, red, and blue and all the rainbow colors of the night, and what the cop’s face must have looked like, meat on a spit in the red pulsating light of the strobe, his nose bent to one side, bleeding; reflected in his shades, there you sit in stereo: a blubbering boy, hand-cuffed, pinned to the hood, spitting out your bitten- off tongue — But he said he was my friend!     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont July 2013