Bosom Friends

I must have heard it in a Keats poem.

Bosom friends… But I'd rather it had been

Written about Anne Shirley's Diana

Or an Austen heroine's confidante.

Picture disclosures on tufted chaises;

Fussy needlework that lies unfinished;

Women confessing and sorting their cares

Walking unchaperoned on orchard paths.

Bosom friends share a bed, huddled for warmth

When coal and wood grow scarce and are rationed;

Delicately lace each other's corsets

When estates no longer support handmaids;

Prepare one another for grand display

And for use by heroic bachelors.

They sublimate their collective despair

With duty and romantic ambition.

Perhaps I do not want a bosom friend,

Though the phrase births a blithe lie in my skull:

She's a phantom on my desperate phone call.

We giggle over a comedy show,

Touching into my sadness just enough

That by natter's end, The Pain perishes

In a proper flash of gracious fire.

Its wise ash remains in glowing embers.

You can barely see my father wounds now;

New confidence has salved his fetters' scars.

I deserve to belong; do this; say that.

So I leverage zeitgeist and nostalgia.

Curious asks make timely offerings;

Answers merge with beer lace and cocktail fumes.

Life's ineffable things entrance the throng,

But we always depart like floating skulls.

I'm desperate now to heal this mother wound--

A chestful of fifty years' bloody gauze.

I should have sewn a few stitches by now,

With benevolent domination… Right?

Winning friends; influencing people. But

Formulas fail me. Kindness + Structure...

Don't the two equal Vulnerability?

My bosom offers but cannot receive.