Thomas Moore on Friendship

“Each friend is indeed a world, a special sphere of certain emotions, experiences, memoires, and qualities of personality. Each friend takes us into a world that is ourselves as well. We are all made up of many worlds and each friendship brings one or more of those worlds to life. Friendship “constellates” (the word means “an arranging of stars”) one’s unique universe of meaning and value. One shares with a friend a unique way of looking at life and experiencing it, and so our friendships perform a kind of astrology of the soul, opening planetary worlds for us, to give our lives culture and articulation. To lose a friend is to suffer the loss of worlds, and to be lacking in friendship altogether is to be cut off, in a deeply felt way, from a richly self-defining way of being in the world…

Friendship creates the cosmologies in which we live…”

Thomas Moore, Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships

more grief poetry

I was sifting through some poetry files of unfinished or unpolished jottings, and found a cute little rhyming poem that I wrote for Bobby last summer. Now that he is in heaven, you can imagine how this innocuous little number made me sob.

and the whisky goes down like butter
and the tequila goes down like rain
and the vodka goes down like honey
and the gin goes down like pain
and I know I only have you for today
my brother, my love, my friend, my bobby mcgee
i know that you will always go away
but in your heart, don’t stray too far from me.

Lorette C. Luzajic
www.thegirlcanwrite.net
buy my book at indigo or amazon online

An Ode to Supreme Friendship with J and with G, with love

The second time I met Billie Holliday,
the night winds of Lake Michigan were rushing across my face:
icy waves slapped my face, drenched your
“bill cosby” sweater, and Billie,
racing headlong into them, gleefully frozen. Her barks of joy
echoed way into the Illinois sky.

Later, once the ecstasy kicked in, we went about our more urban adventures: somehow you and your crazy skinny cheetah of a dog rescued me in this one week whirlwind tour of Chicago. Our energy was boundless. We feasted on chile-packed flautas, sat on patios, smoking for hours, listening to blues. Or Pet Shop Boys, at cheesy old-school fey establishments. Abba never dies! Our scarves were colourful and outrageous. Your husband and I were too festive even for you, and we acted free and immodest and silly all week long. These types of things with your bestest friends go into the best moments category of your whole life.

The first time I met Billie was something different altogether. I’m so young it’s hazy, half my age. So naïve that now I shudder, how once I was essentially a girl who had no skin, nerves exposed to the open air. But oh, how you couldn’t tell! I was just so fun! I was funnn with three nnns. Roger and me. We made pizza together:
once, after work, after we washed the dough from our hands and snuck our favourite toppings into a Tupperware, he invited me over. I thought he was gay. He was taking me to Denman Station, after all, where I’d hear enough Erasure to be even more fun than I already was. He was so gay that he lit candles all over his place when I got there and put on a stack of vinyl Billie records. We drank cheap pink wine in plastic Dixie cups and then suddenly he said, “Do you want to see how good I am?” And the story gets even sadder because I stammered uh, umm, and then ended up staying, out of politeness really. It was like the second time or something and nothing to write about in the ole diary.

Dear girls, our adventures have mellowed us, with the years, oh yes. I know I won’t be hallucinating tonight. What splendid things, friends, they are angels, resplendent sprites. These two wrote my name in rocks at Maccu Piccu the last time they were gone from me, while my husband was dying and soon they were coming home. Tonight Billie’s dad and I are on our own. After rice noodles and sugarcane shrimp, we will be meeting for a gin and tonic and a discussion on Dinah Washington. I’m reading about all these fierce crazy blues divas and you’re the one who’s memorized every Holliday ever smoked through. Sometimes we just sit in a dingy place and drink rye and seven and talk endlessly about things that never run out.

Lorette C. Luzajic
www.thegirlcanwrite.net
Lorette’s poetry has been widely published for years. Grain, Fiddlehead, Quarry, Modern Poetry, White Wall Review, Rattle, Caffeine… and online. She should concentrate more on poetry, but lately has been concentrating on gigs that pay better. So help inspire my muse by ordering my acclaimed first collection, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. You will be surprised and amazed, and will look at life and death differently after.

xoxo Lorette