It Will All Make Sense Someday (with #BehindTheBlogger)

Off and on all this long, long day

I have been thinking of this past friend

Who has the same first name as I do

I suppose he still has it

Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him in years

He could be dead

But then

He would still have his name

As one does

He’s a for-real athlete, this guy, why

One year he even played pro soccer

(or football, as they call it, where he played)

It’s one of the many ways we’re different, he and I

For I am nobody’s idea of an athlete

Whatever the sport may be called

But we were friends

And sometimes when you’re with a friend

You can see something with that friend’s eyes

The only soccer match I ever bothered watching

Was with him

One day, suddenly, he filled his apartment with books

I said man, if you read all these books…

You will be a legitimate intellectual!

Whereupon he took down a book

And proceeded to prove to me, to his own satisfaction

That intellectual did not mean what I thought it meant

I remained unconvinced

He’s a concrete thinker, he is, so to him you see

A word has correct meanings and you know them or you don’t

Whereas I am more of the school that words can mean…

Whatever we agree that they mean. That’s what they convey anyway

Like if I say

That round, checker-patterned do-hickey

And we both know I mean the soccer ball there

Then ‘do-hickey’ means ‘soccer ball’ for us

Though that’s not what the books say ‘do-hickey’ means

If ‘do-hickey’ is to be found in the books at all

We saw art differently too

I clearly recall, one fall afternoon, what now – nine years ago?

I had fallen into a mania, hadn’t slept for days, was utterly absorbed

In art-making

I was taking

Huge sheets of clear contact paper

Laying them out on the floor

And sticking to their sticky sides scraps and clippings

From magazines, papers, brochures, mail circulars…

Images and words, chunks of color… a lot of blood-red

I was collaging

The art of pastiche

So deep into that afternoon, he came to my door unannounced

Worried, not having heard from me in a week or two

And when he witnessed my mad, manic mess of collages

All over the floor and walls

He cried out, “Goddamn!” (and he is a religious man)

“What is this?! What the Hell do you think you’re doing?!”

To which I replied, “It is art! I am making art!”

“This isn’t art!”

“Why not?” I asked

“Because it isn’t beautiful!”

Him saying that, that it wasn’t art if it wasn’t beautiful

Is why I have been thinking of him today

For I have just recently fallen in with some poets

As I have been moved to make poetry again

I have sought them out, these poets

And they have shared some of their work with me

And it is beautiful, almost all

Beyond doubt: beyond what I think, beyond what you think

Beyond the eye of the beholder, these are beautiful words

‘The nacre of morning’… ‘The nadir of their love affair’…

Beautiful images, sentiments, beautifully put, beauty beauty beauty

Until I do not know what beauty means

Anymore

Except that this, this is not that

There is no nacre, no nadir here

Meter nor rhyme

Nor nothing

Will they need to be kind, presented with my pages?

Will they shake their heads and sigh and shy away?

Will they say of this as my long-ago same-name friend said

Of the ugly collages crowding my little apartment

“This isn’t art!”

No.

But they will see

My words and ideas jerking along like so many ill-made robots

Against the fluid motions of their own elegant creations

Perhaps they will say, some of these poets whom I admire

“This piece simply isn’t for me.”

Sure they will, sure they will… and that’s okay

People can have different tastes

And still be friends

It will all make sense someday

My friend I didn’t see many times after that

At a bar one night some months later, where we happened both to be

He took me to task for being stupid drunk

And I had wit enough left, just, slurringly to explain

That getting stupid was my very reason for getting drunk

After that, I heard that he was mastering swing dance

And had become a full-fledged major heart-throb hunk

Then I heard he was engaged to be married, but that she broke his heart

And after that, nothing more

Thank you for reading a story from #BehindTheBlogger Hop. Every 2 weeks a group of bloggers is given a writing prompt. These prompts are very open ended, so our bloggers can write about whatever they desire. The main rule is that their blog post directly relates to the topic of that week. The point of this hop is for our readers to get to know us on a personal level.  Please hop along and read all of the blog posts in this weeks hop. Just click the links below. If you want real and raw emotion, then you will find it here. After you read each post, please comment and share. We want to get to know you too!

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