Strange Friend, Civil War

Hi. It’s been a while. And here we are again. 

It’s taken time, to get back here. Back to playing and dreaming, fantasizing. Back to feeling alive again. 

It’s taken a few things; for me it’s taken a strange friend. 

Someone I’m very lucky to have, and to whom I’ve written and speak tonight. 

I wish I could give everyone in this room a friend like this. A real weirdo. The best stranger I know.  

Not a best friend, no. Give it a twist. 

Throw some time and distance between our feet,

Even a kinda foreign language but still somehow we speak,

In open conflict,

Focused care,

One on one like a crazy meet-cute truth-or-dare. 

And when we part ways (inevitably), we just go as we please, 

But a little altered,

A little stronger,

And pleasantly ill at ease. 

Yes it had to take a strange friend to get me back here. A best one knows you too well, but a strange one knows all the possibilities of you and therefore provokes, challenges you to dream new, strange, and scary things.

With a strange friend is where you practice the game of war.

Because always somewhere in the world there is one,

To prepare for. 

Always somewhere in the world there is a bloody cruelty. 

Always somewhere there is an emotional defiling, prickly familiar when you sense it. 

Always there is a liquid line just there, fascinating, haunting, but never crossed.

Somewhere there is a depression, a well in the ground where we keep our pride like a watermark fast-receding.

Somewhere there is a grave digger’s economy, somewhere is always unofficially ruled by a scorched hair policy,

And always somewhere in the world history is being bookended by a trauma and offered for our consideration, and our children’s.

And now I think for most of us at least it’s a little bit closer than it was before…

Before was when I still played at pre-war.

In the last few years I didn’t lose anyone…

Or, no one died who had the power to kill me. No, their power over me is still very much alive—

          In the last few years and counting someone visited the ER five times, six.

          In the last few years someone lost all their colors in favor of grays.

          Someone threatened suicide—

          In the last few years and counting, someone is trying even now with all of her a little love to say goodbye to the old bullies, a holy children who should have been her best friends.

          Not the schoolyard kind, but the home cell kind: the teenage mother and the infant father, poor twisted babies both,

          Who tore at the tender hopes of my mother.

          In the last few years and counting, someone’s estranged big brother fell, bad, and broke himself, for good, in his upper level apartment where he lived alone since before the phone calls stopped 30+ years ago,

           Between the only two remaining testaments to an old-world fleeing-family, exiled forever by desperate choice from their small home block, 

           Ever occupied,

           Ever in between, an eastern hard place and a western rock.

          That big brother to my father last November and ages ago was gone before I was born. 

And two years ago I didn’t know.

          Before the last few years and counting, in the deepest parts of a white picketed haze, a little bud plucked herself from a dusty vine and rose up to try to tell her story. This is how it goes:

          One evening,

          In Disneyland, dreaming,

          A little girl let go of her father‘s hand.

          While anniversary fireworks covered the sky, and rain smeared the colors and faces above her.

          A mother with her child would not look down,

          An older pair upfront could not turn around,

          Crowds of pedestrians did not seem to hear

           It all disappear

           Her cries in their throats,

           Her tears in the notes of the Mickey Mouse song, that they all stood for.

           Her hair turned to ashes of what was before.

Sometimes it starts that young, the great Civil War.

Hand me down uniforms are ill-suited to navigate by the stars on a firework tonight.

Only predators see then,

Only praying bring sight,

A Civil War is not won, it’s survived.

And if you’re lucky then,

To be given a strange friend,

An hour, a question, a hair’s length to spend on you,

Well then

It’s such a constant surprise:

          With just a drop; love, from a magical stranger,

          Just a pinch of concentrated curiosity,

          A few uninterrupted, unrushed hours 

And I

        Believe

                    In Me

                            Again—

And suddenly my niece turns five, six!

Suddenly the warm quick arms of my baby sister are welcoming me to her and then sending me back off again!

Suddenly heat, here, from that light, right there, on this stage, and my skin,

A burning I did not believe I remembered how to bear!

And suddenly I am falling 

                                          In love 

                                                    Again

                               But not really 

                Toying with the fall

I seem to peak right at the edge. 

I try, I do. 

I paint my heart on my skin,

My face—now and then—

But my scalp is still my souvenir,

From that fire-worked year,

Internal burn, when rainbow sparklers took their turn and toyed with the buried thorns that were left behind from That First War. 

A Civil War is not won, it is worn. 

And if you can find in your closet a seasonal hanger, in its name,

—Like Love, or

A Strange Friend—

to come around now and again,

Then maybe you’ve grasped the game

Of the rose and the thorn. 

And together you play more and more 

        At Civil War. 

        More and more 

Play down into the cave, 

                 For hiding / For excavating 

        More and more 

Play up toward the edge,

                 For jumping / For flying 

        More and more 

A Civil War is not won, it is born,

And if possible,

And with a strange friend,

born again.