Seen first on Instagram Stories @billfriday
Copyright (c) 2020 William S. Friday
And Please Don’t Call Me When You Read This Because I’m Fine
Category: Bloody Awful Poetry
Pouring Hot Coffee into Cold (4:17 am)
On Instagram (@billfriday if you’re curious) I do original, multi-media content on my stories page.
This is one of those Instagram Stories.
Words and photo are mine, and mine alone. Click the Instagram link in the right margin for more.
Copyright (c) 2020 William S. Friday
Expositing
Expositing
“Why can’t you tell me how you really feel?”
You mean like, expositing
the shooting star, blazing
through the night sky?
In that moment, gazing?
Catch me when my tears dry.
Copyright (c) 2020 William S. Friday
To Rise
“You wouldn’t know it from the sun,
melting to rise like the rest of the world,
but the birds were singing…“
Copyright (c) 2020 William S. Friday
(because)
Disenfranchised
I lost a child. You lost a parent. She lost a spouse. He lost a limb. We lose what we lose, and when it’s lost, it is gone. Not misplaced.
Not missing like car keys to be found five minutes later next to the half-and-half in the fridge.
But missing like one minute you’re saying “Good morning”, “Goodnight”, “See you soon”, and the next, you’re never saying it again, except to a ghost.
This is grief, unless it’s not your child, your parent, your spouse, or your limb. Then, it’s an excuse, a personal problem, a character flaw. And it isn’t even that your grief doesn’t belong to you, it’s that you don’t belong to your grief.
You are disenfranchised.
From your pain. From your love. From your god-granted human experience. From all of it.
You are disenfranchised.
She lost a best friend? Get over it. He lost a girlfriend? Get over it. They lost a reason to get out of bed in the morning? Get the fuck over it.
When our right to grieve is denied us, except within the boxes others say must be checked. When all love is love, but not all grief is grief. When pain and mourning require blood kin for legitimacy. And when the dignity to recover, as we are, is questioned, we are disenfranchised.
And if you wonder why this story has no end, it is because, like an end to grief, there isn’t one. Because like you, like me, like he, like she, it, and we, remain disenfranchised.
© Copyright 2018 William S. Friday
Baby Face Chinaski
I don’t have time for your shit,
you post-pubescent misanthrope.
Once upon a time,
when your ironic alter-ego roamed the streets,
and haunted the bars of dirty L.A.
like a piss-stained ghost,
you were yet a regret in your
bitch of a mother’s misbegotten womb.
Although I don’t think I blame her
for how you turned out,
given how you beg for the teat
in every Facebook post of yours
I have ever read.
Maybe I’ll listen to you
when you can grow a mustache
thicker than a row of pubes.
Until then,
I will simply shake my head,
and comment less and less,
because the only two things you are listening to
in these last days of your misspent youth
are your own mewling laments of growing up too fast,
and the hollow sympathies of girls your own age,
who would sooner court the clap
than give you what you think will make it all better
for just one night,
before the sun rises in your sunken child-eyes,
and you post online once more.
© Copyright 2017 William S. Friday
The Theory of Tears
Tears don’t scare me.
I know people hate them,
in themselves and in others,
depending on just how manipulated
tears make them feel.
Manipulated,
not by the tears,
but for the reasons they flow.
There is a theory of tears,
known only by a few.
Not by the ones who cry,
but by the ones who hold it in.
They have learned
all the reasons for them,
and choose not to give them away.
Unmanipulated,
and unmanipulating.
They hold onto the tears
as tightly as they do the theory.
Tears don’t scare me,
they say,
as long as I don’t have to see them.
At least that’s what their theory says.
But the truth about
the theory of tears is this;
that tears are only scary
on the inside.
© Copyright 2017 William S. Friday
If God
If God
is like
you,
then
there is
no God.
Copyright © 2016 William S. Friday
Muth Labben
Today is for counting my wasted yesterdays
Each one neatly lined up
row on dusty row
Every year the same
Today is for remembering your unborn tomorrows
And the time I sit
because walking is too slow
There is no blame
Today is for pretending to make sense of the past
From a life ended
with nothing to show
When I speak your name
Today is for thinking that memories last
But all they do is fade
until they go
Like every unfinished song to be sung
About the death of a son
Copyright © 2012 William S. Friday
