“Write a poem themed around friendship, with imagery or other ideas taken from a painting by Carrington, and a painting by Varo.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-seventeen-11/)
I saw you across a room (such an embarrassing
trite way to see someone!) and I was
shocked at how fully you existed in space
without any apparent care for how people
see you. You were more yourself than anyone
I’d ever witnessed. I’d always been a wallflower,
someone often not noticed when I arrived,
unnoticed when I left, and I never knew
how to be around someone as blazing and
visible as you! I didn’t know what to think
when I saw you, standing in the center of
the room, amid your adoring crowd, basking
in their attention, because somehow I saw
myself, too, through you, and I couldn’t
understand why. You saw me, and came over,
said “Hello” and for once I didn’t wilt
farther into my wall. I said “Hi” back,
so out of character, and then it was the next day,
and the sun was coming up, the golden hour of
morning, and we had talked about everything
in the whole entire world. I delighted to learn
how utterly weird you were! The kind of weird
that makes you so deeply yourself, and I got
to be my weird self with you without
embarrassment. We were never weird
the same way, but to the same degree, and
ours was such a wonderfully compatible
weirdness! Today, I came to visit you, as so many
times in our past, and you let me speak this time
without interruption, without passionate argument,
and now it’s sunset, the golden hour to end the day,
so I rise from the grass, remove the dead flowers
and dirt from your memorial (such a normal thing
to mark the life of such a definitively
weird person!) and I don’t know how to be
myself anymore without your shining glorious
weirdness buffering against me, I no longer
know how to be weird alone.
John the Librarian 