The Opposite of Friend

What is the opposite of friend?
A dangling question;
Drowning fishes;
The Arizona Desert.
Unexpected silence.

Growing up in my family
Was much like hiding.

When I was little,
I owned a microscope set.

As it turns out,
I am all-seeing but not all-knowing.

When I close my eyes,
I hear a song:

‘Cause there’s a Continental Trailways leaving local bus tonight, good evening
You can have my seat, I’m sticking round here for a while
Get me a room at the Squire, the filling station’s hiring,
And I can eat here every night, what the hell have I got to lose?
Got a crazy sensation, go or stay? now I gotta choose,
And I’ll accept your invitation to the blues

I am not interested in geography;
What I want to know is,
When?

What is the definition of friend?

This is Just Killing Me.

This little excerpt I’m sure I read before is gnawing at me. It is a good chew, a necessary function of thought, the slow grinding of guts and gears; the spark of synaptical leaps. It is stuck in my skull, like the simple sentence written on a torn piece of paper I found in the computer lab yesterday,
“I remember Kayla Combs.”
It sang me to sleep and sang me awake. And these leaves of Whitman’s, veined with color and common as dirt repeat and fold at the back of my eyes. When I read it aloud for my parents, my dad grumbled and left the room. I will never sing, “I remember Kayla Combs” for him. He would never understand.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Old LJ Posts

I found a little yellow sticky note. The grimy little thing lost its stick long ago and it sailed behind my desk: A little yellow snowflake; A long-forgotten password in blued ink.

“So, there you are!”

I found my log in information from my old LJ. I thought the poems were lost forever and ever. Most of them are “friends only”. And all of them are old.

master piece

She had skills,
Many practical skills.
She could draw and paint.
She had been trained.
She learned to drive and shop
And cook for herself.

And she lived like that,
Drawing and painting
Just what she saw.
But she couldn’t see much:
Just how things looked.

She never skinny-dipped on a July night,
Or caressed her own body in the shower.
She never climbed up to a high place
To scream for God to show Herself.

She never swore or smoked
Or let herself stop being careful.
She drew and painted little shapes
That stayed little shapes.

The Masterpiece hides between
the fibers of her canvas,
Hidden by expertly applied layers of gesso.

The little shapes wait to be arranged wildly,
Impatiently. Her body waits to be caressed.
Her skills wait to be abandoned.
Her life waits to be lived.