[Newspoetry] Friends

[DL Emerick]

My friends, there are no friends..

So write Derrida in his tractate
on the politics of freindship,
examining the apocryphal Aristotle,
who was so precisely analytic,
about friendship itself,
in his Nicomachean Ethics.

And, Derrida examines Nietszche,
on his reversal of the phrase,
my foes, there are no foes.

All this does not matter, of course,
not that one learns anything,
from any of these scholars,
but that they said it first,
long before the thought ever came.
to me or to you, my dearest friend.

What is a friend, anyway?
Someone who accepts you,
perhaps, as you are, a mortal,
frail and imperfect,
full of flaws, limitations,
most of all mortal,
bound to die, all too soon.

A true friend, so we think,
ought to survive us, 
live longer to sing our praise,
long after our body has rotted.

The politics of friendship
is a politics of patrimony,
of what those who live after will say,
in memoriam, afterwords,
of those of us who precede them,
in the quiet dignity of certain death.

I have stood beside the dying,
by the hospital bedside,
while death happened,
hoping for a last word,
an acknowledgement of my caring,
that it mattered to the dying,
but all I ever got was nothing,
but the lonely shudders of death,
as life left the still bodies,
of the ones I loved, dying.

I wept tears, there and then,
not at their loss, but mine,
for I was always left behind,
to carry the burden of life on,
without their help, alone.

My friends, there are friends,
but do not count upon them,
as you would count sheep,
who leap over you in sleep.

Rather, each friend is but one,
not to be added to anything else,
unique and indecipherable,
ever an unknown, as X in life,
totally unknown to you.