As writers, making friends can be difficult. Even harder is the keeping of them, unless…
Letter To Friends
by Odin Roark
It’s somewhat of a saga,
all those years.
You weren’t always my friends.
We all know that.
Especially that first try,
“Sunrise,” remember,
hiding from me for years,
telling me I needed to grow up?
Then came the collection of buddies
I met when my pen found napkins aplenty
night after night, martini after martini,
bar bill after bar bill. I remember that stool well.
Coming out didn’t happen easy,
‘cause you didn’t hide. Oh, no.
You stayed in my face for years,
reminding me you might end up
my only friends.
So…
So, you were right,
up to a point.
There were others,
like the few essays;
the ones who let me
be truthful to myself.
Then, there were those long drawn out years
when I was hooking up with novels,
one, two and three. You guys wouldn’t
even call them by their names—
kept dissing me like a betrayer.
So what, I didn’t visit you often.
You forget I did put many of you
in good homes. Bound well,
fine paper, unique covers.
You were given class.
Now…
Okay, so I pick different kinds of friends
To make nowadays. Times have changed.
There’s plenty of heart and passion
out there on the street. I had to find
some new acquaintances, do some dating,
you know, a few hours here, a few there.
And yes, some became real. I mean real, real.
They gave me some respect. I gave it back,
Even though… Well, you know.
These friends weren’t very sociable,
coming from mixed breeding, an ethnicity
called prosetry, a mix of two languages
from diverse cultures of prose and verse.
the world from different perspectives.
There was a lot of baggage being dragged behind.
Life’s fault lines had shifted radically. So many ideas
needed personification, you know? Like a said before,
emotions worn on lapels were bountiful, some even
overrated, and thinking was getting a bad rap.
So, anyway…
Here we are. I’ve got old friends and new. You leave your pages often and visit me.
I appreciate that.
Yeah…
True friends are hard to find, but where the people
on the street hold to the cliché: ‘You’re lucky if you
find 6 loyal friends in a lifetime,” I’ve got 2,143
in writing at last count.
Now, who’s going to try and tell me it can
get better than that?
So…
Couldn’t have been much fun, our making this work.
Thanks for putting up with all those cross-outs,
smudges, deletes, and misspellings.
(Mistakes tried hard to break us up, but…
gotta love spellcheck and old man Thesaurus, eh?)
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well done
I never used a dictionary or thesaurus. Probably why my vocabulary is weak and my writing is near illiterate. These days I'm grateful for my friends, spelling and grammar checker, and my dictation system that puts the wrong word in place perfectly spelled.
Ron