Life & Wisdom Quote by Bradley Chicho

“Blunders, no” opens like a self-correction caught on the page: the speaker swats away the easy label of mistake and replaces it with something harder to excuse. The line implies that what we call blunders are often choices we’d rather narrate as accidents. That abrupt negation is a poet’s way of showing a mind policing its own story in real time.

Then comes the ethical twist: “only friendship binds us to honesty.” Not conscience, not virtue, not law - friendship. Honesty here isn’t a personal achievement; it’s social gravity. You tell the truth because someone you care about makes lying feel like betrayal, not because you’ve ascended to moral clarity. The subtext is slightly chilling: without relationship, truth becomes optional. The poem needles the liberal fantasy that integrity is self-sustaining.

The surreal image that follows - “attracting crypts of mushrooms” - shifts honesty from a clean, upright concept to something fungal, hidden, and insistently alive. Crypts suggest burial chambers, secrecy, rot, ancestry. Mushrooms thrive on what’s decomposing. The poem hints that truth sprouts from what we’d rather keep underground: shame, history, the compost of past selves. Friendship doesn’t just demand honesty; it excavates.

“In the wake of our snowboards” drags all that subterranean growth behind a glossy, adrenaline culture of speed and performance. Snowboarding leaves tracks that look temporary, even cool - until the thaw reveals what the passage stirred up. Chicho’s intent feels like a collision between youthful motion and adult reckoning: we carve forward, but our relationships pull the buried stuff into daylight anyway.