It's always heartbreaking to see a friend hurting and know there's nothing I can do to help/make them feel a little better other than talk and listen (not even a hug, because of distance). It's even worse when that hurt is from an experience that mirrors my own, when the friend questioning her reality causes me to question my own.
What are we to each other online? Are our friendships genuine? Do our feelings and our exchanges of words matter or are they "just pixels on a screen", to be snuffed out by the click of a "Block" button? Is it worth the effort we put in to connect, knowing that we can so easily lose interest and disconnect? Is it silly to mourn them, the people who ghost us?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if
you’re really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me?
Is this microphone live?
Let me do it right for once,
for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars
that becomes, you know the story, simply heaven.
Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
and when you open your eyes only a clearing with deer in it.
Hello deer.
Inside your head the sound of glass, a car crash sound
as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
Hello darling, sorry about that.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here,
sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
Especially that, but I should have known.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.
I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version
you are not feeding yourself to a bad man
against a black sky prickled with small lights.
I take it back. The wooden halls like caskets.
These terms from the lower depths.
I take them back. Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
Crossed out.
— Richard Siken; Litany in which Certain things are Crossed Out
... where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
You used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it' all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I' not jealous
because we' never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame - not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD.
[... ] I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn't happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn't help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.
— Charles Bukowski; An Almost Made Up Poem
Post thumbnail Photo by Burak Kostak from/on Pexels
