My name is Podrigotuma and poetry for me has become a scripture that is in partnership with my life.

I trust that somebody around the world has written a poem that is going to be sufficient for the moments of my life where I need something that hasn't been said to me before.

And if I can't find it, I try to write it.

All my friends are finding new beliefs by Christian Wyman.

All my friends are finding new beliefs.

This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees in a highly literary and hitherto religiously indifferent Jew, God Wampson, like a genetic generator, paleo, keto, zone, south of the world.

One man marries a woman 20 years younger and twice in one branch uses the word verdant.

Another is brick-fisted belligerence, gentles into dementia and one after a decade of finical faints and teases like a sandpaper at the edge of the sea decides to die.

Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glee's, high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt, sobriities, citieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of being.

All my friends are finding new beliefs.

And I am finding it harder and harder to keep track of the new gods and the new loves and the old gods and the old loves.

And the days have daggers and the mirrors motives and the planets turning faster and faster in the blackness and my nights and my doubts and my friends, my beautiful, credible friends.

So this poem is really a poem written in middle age and looking at friendships that have lasted into middle age and what friendships in middle age can mean.

Not that everybody in this poem is the same age, we have no idea. Some of these people might be older than the poor, some might be younger.

But I find that it's a poem that is really paying attention to the serious questions of friendship that happen at a particular stage in life, maybe in your late 40s or 50s.

What does it mean to preserve these friendships and what does it mean to live with each other through the changes that come in mid-life?

In his book, my brighter bis, Chris Weiman has this line to say that when he began to be more open to belief, he began to become more open to doubt also because he said belief in doubt are part of the same thing.

He said when he wasn't interested in those things, neither the belief nor a doubt or unbelief was of any interest to him.

But it was an opening up to one that he opened up to many. And I think his writing about the marrow of things, the questions of religion, the questions of meaning has always from me been very brave because he always proposes the thing as well as the anti thing.

And in this he's seeing all this happening in other people because it's been happening in him too. And he's saying, yeah, me too.

And what's really important to him in the middle of these big questions of belief is his beautiful, credible friends, the ones who are really worth believing in.

And they're believable because they're your friends, not because of anything else, not because they've got this new diet or because they've got this new religion, or not because the mirror is kind to them and not to other people, or because they have an understanding of the afterlife or that they've survived an illness or because an illness has killed them.

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