Yellow Bastard Between Teal Lines
Can any body out there ever
really hear me, not like the cat
hears me with eyes I
know are not about me?
I have a new friend who knows it all,
A lover I once had lots of sex with
(oh, how even here, when
I’m trying to be the one to listen to myself
I craft - can’t stand long with that preposition
I ended with will also end with
purposefully here to end with)
A shaman woman
woe’s man who helps freely then
shatters like a bubble
pricked by turnabout
(this uncertainty principle is impossible)
Cast your fate to the wind not
to friends the ones who poker and chess
One can josh but will only be serious about business
(“never do business with friends”)
The other, after games, prefers only reality T.V.
Another woman friend either hides from the world
or is too much in it, how like my friend who
having found enlightenment,
isolates in the desert but only because it’s cheaper there.
A new friend who loves the arts
totally active full of bright intensity
will not abide my shadow.
Then there are the poets
their community of terminal self-absorption:
Who broods over the poets but the poets?
Speaking for myself
what I seek from poets
is
my self
reflected
Am I the first poet to find Narcissus
winking back from the pg.,
yellow bastard between teal lines?
(yellow negative space – some use white-lined notebooks
I use yellow legal pads)
Better to stop this scribbling
now
Stare into the yellow void
Seek your most intimate
friend
—Ed Coletti