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The Friend Of My Friend Is My Enemy

No doubt this title has been used elsewhere before. But Poetic Asides wanted a “friend of a friend” poem today, and this was the first thing that popped into mind. I have a lot of friends who are hot messes; I support their choice to be hot messes while trying to help rein them in a little. But then their other hot mess friends just encourage them further. This is how people end up with all kinds of crazy addictions and diseases, I dare say.

The Friend of My Friend is My Enemy

Change places: now I’ll be the angel, perched
delicately on your right with long rubberband whispers
to cast like grapples into your empty ear

and he’ll put on horns, plant his pitchfork
deep to fire nerves and muscles, marionette your hands
to some self-destructive mischief. I like to say

I’m an enabler, full of beautiful vertigo and
suspended disbelief: but this is me changing nooses
for bungee cords, this is one secretive touch

always ready to pull you back from the brink,
tandem when we fall. And when he calls you up,
says paint your face and meet me downtown,

then I’m green with envy and green with worried
sick with glassy-eyed photographs the only evidence
of a wild night, or bruises and blood canyons

from this party or that. Where was he with
bandages and a well-placed hand? Picking meat
out of his teeth; pissing in a corner somewhere;

ready to do it again. A pitchfork always gets
too heavy in my hands, after a while: I wish my wings
stayed strong enough to carry us both.

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Bouquet

This week’s We Write Poems prompt is to talk about the little bits of material memory that key off whole oceans of remembrance; very Proustian kind of topic that I’m rather fond of touching on frequently. There are three songs that immediately come to mind with the way the prompt phrased this idea:

I don’t mean to seem like I care about
material things, like a social status:
I just want four walls and adobe slabs
for my girls.
– Animal Collective, My Girls

The things that I’ve loved, the things that I’ve lost
The things I’ve held sacred that I’ve dropped
I won’t lie no more than you can bet
I don’t want to learn what I’ll need to forget.
– Audioslave, Doesn’t Remind Me

Goldenrod, and the 4-H Stone:
the things I brought you when I found out you had
cancer of the bone.
– Sufjan Stevens, Casimir Pulaski Day

Warning on the last one, should you choose to look them up: it is one of the most depressing and beautiful songs anyone has ever written.

Anyway, there’s a lot of music about this stuff, and I could probably go on. I’ll stop at three. This poem is a true story about the First Real Boyfriend. I never went to prom in high school: it was a Catholic school, and I came out of the closet instead. (My girlfriend was remarkably understanding.) So the next summer, there was an LGBT prom at the community center in the city, and the Boyfriend came and picked me up in his white convertible; we dressed to the nines and had (unplanned) gotten each other flowers; which we then gave away to the group of sassy black ladies mentioned in the poem. It was an enchanted evening that will forever sum up the totality of that relationship for me: I was 18, and in love, and I still hold on to that several years later. I kept the detritus of that bouquet until there was nothing left to keep except that one piece, which he took with him to move across the country.

We still talk. He has a boyfriend now, and I’m recently without one, and so it goes.

I was reading Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses last night. That informed the structure of this.

Bouquet

We gave away the roses to old sisters
sunning themselves in the June heat that night because
they said you got any of them for us honey
and we thought as good them as any other and
they belled with pleasures to receive
wilting fistfuls of red petals and thick thorns

and for the longest time the ferns and baby’s breath
withered in my room with their vase pool
long since evaporated to beige dust
until even what might have been stems or sepals
suggested only hair and hyphens and broken lines
that well-meaning mothers sweep up when you’re out

so I had to make do with the tattered
inconstant cellophane offending me with its
transparency like so much of what we were
with our brutal honesty and single tears which
brimmed and released on the phone or
in starlit parks or when you drove away from here forever

which of course is when the red scrap of satin ribbon
that had held the whole damn thing together passed
from my palm to yours leaving me thinking
that’s all there is to it except you knew at once
what it was and so silently we both knew
all there is to it is us and that is enough.

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Re-lining “Divorce Song”

A curious challenge from Donna this week: to re-line a song and see if the poetry is still in there without a music. Lyrics are already an important aspect of whether or not I like a song; I’ll dance around with Muppet arms to the latest greatest pop anthem as much as the next person, but for me to truly love a singer, they have to be a poet as well. I chose Liz Phair’s “Divorce Song” because it’s one of my favorites, but isn’t particularly (in my opinion) inspired insofar as poetic tropes and rhythmic uniqueness are concerns; but something about the natural rawness of the lyrics and the sound of her voice just makes it work brilliantly. Let’s see how it goes when we abridge it a bit and mess with the enjambment!

I feel a bit like William Shatner doing spoken-word.

Divorce Song (by Liz Phair)

And when I asked for
a separate room, it was late at night,
and we’d been driving
since noon. But, if I’d known how
that would sound to you, I would have
stayed in your bed for
the rest of my life: just to prove
I was right,

that it’s harder
to be friends than lovers, and
you shouldn’t try
to mix the two: because if you do it,
and you’re still unhappy, then you know
the problem is you.

And it’s true that
I stole your lighter, and it’s also true that
I lost the map, but when you said
that I wasn’t worth talking to, I had to
take your word on that. But, if you’d known how
that would sound to me, you would have
taken it back, boxed it up
and buried it in the ground,
Burned it up and thrown it
away.

And you put in my hands
a loaded gun, and then told me
not to fire it when you did the things
you said were up to me, and then
accused me of trying
to fuck it up: but, you’ve never been
a waste of my time. It’s never been
a drag.

(So take a deep breath and count back
from ten; and maybe you’ll be alright.)

And the license said
you had to stick around until I was dead.
But if you’re tired of looking
at my face, I guess
I already am.

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Reverie Three: symbolic frolic

It is a frolicsome kind of day, from my end at least. The first real snow of winter (not counting the freak snowstorm around Halloween, which I don’t include) fell overnight/this morning, and I’m as giddy as a schoolboy about that. Even though, in the city, it turns all too quick to black slush, it’s still pretty and makes the cold a bit more bearable. So I’m incorporating the idea of the frolic into the title of this week’s exercise, because it rhymes and works and whatnot.

This week: “symbolic frolic“

Symbolism is kind of a no-brainer for doing poetry, and it’s usually one of the easiest things people grasp when starting to write. (Different strengths for different folks, though: some people get metaphor right away, some people get rhyme right away, etc.) The trap, though, is that the first thing you master in poetry can often be the one you become most complacent about; symbolism is especially tough for this because you want people to understand the allusions you’re making, and therefore one is prone to sticking with traditional, even trite connections. Some of them are even encoded into language, at this point: how many poems use the color blue to represent sadness?

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no problem with using the correspondences that people will understand easily and quickly, and I encourage their use. But I also encourage pushing the envelope a little bit, trying to invent your own connections. For me, I don’t get “blue”; if I had to describe the color of my sadness, it would be dark, dark green or some ugly shade of mustard. You can’t take this too far, or the reader will be completely lost in (to quote a comic Barbara shared not long ago, by Matt Groening) “a complex and private system of symbols that no one else can possibly understand.” The happy medium is what we want to aim for, where the significance of a thing, idea, or quality, related to some other thing, idea, or quality, is explicit enough that the reader gets it, but unique enough that it will be more memorable.

(The quick and dirty way to do this is just a metaphor, “X is Y”, but we don’t want to be that direct.)

So let’s do this in stages. First, make a list of ten notions you might want to touch on in your poem, significant or interesting things that you want to be the “theme” the reader teases out of your poem. Things like fear of death, unrequited love, a momentary loss of reason, impatience, or complete freedom. Ponder them for a while, before picking one (or two, if you’re really indecisive), and writing down some further aspects or traditional symbols that go with your notion. If I choose fear of death, I might say, what if there’s no afterlife?, fear of the loss of the body, and not enough time; I could get some mementos mori in there and list skull, disease, and graveyard.

Now the tricky part: find some more (try for ten) things and ideas that aren’t associated with your theme, at least not on the surface. (If you’re feeling particularly clever, you could pick things that have a secondary, tertiary, or further down meaning which matches your theme.) I could say noon, dandelions, orange trees, or a globe, none of which are very thanatophobic. At closer inspection though, flowering trees do seem to subtly suggest death: once they blossom and flourish with beauty, they quickly wither and shed their petals (a very Japanese interpretation of the cherry, for example). And high noon: when else does the sun glare down and seem as judgmental as the eye of God/gods/Anubis/whoever? Or dandelions that go to seed, ready to be puffed away into oblivion?

And the trickier part is to get your reader to reach these conclusions as well. You may need to be pretty straightforward about it:

The noonday sun, peering down with
terrible finality: I trembled, wondering which parts of me
would be burnt away at last.

And for an added challenge, now you can add metaphors in: take your symbol and change it into something else:

A hundred orange tree eyes were opening, closing,
calices weeping with perfume already spiked by
last night’s frost:
not even the beginnings of swelling
under those long petal lashes, and already
they were starting to go to rot.

And so forth. You may need to do a few attempts to find what seems like a good balance between the obvious and the cryptic (these opposite ends are easy to achieve, if you want), but you’ll end up with something complexly beautiful. A good test: ask someone what they associate with your chosen symbol; see if they name your theme anywhere in the list; then show them your poem, and if they come away from it saying, “I never thought orange blossoms could make me worry about my own mortality before”, you win. (That is just an example, of course. They won’t say that if your poem has greyhounds of diffidence or coffee grounds of growing panic.)

Make the symbol (or symbols, if you decide to develop more than one around your theme) stand out and be the central character of your poem; the subject is the symbol, and its purpose is the theme. Furthermore, don’t be afraid to know your subject; I highlighted “calices” in red above because my guess is that the average reader won’t know the word. They will either infer the meaning, look it up, or assume it’s a typo (“chalices?”) that works in this case; I’m fine with any of the above here. Don’t show off, but don’t be afraid to do some research for your own benefit and add a bit of color to make your symbols more lively.

This is something you can practice over and over, to different degrees, in multiple poems. In time, you might build up that private system of symbols, but don’t be afraid to let the readers in a bit. They will appreciate and enjoy it more in the long run; you might just need to put up a signpost or two along the way.