G: i turned the conversation into a poem
C: haha found poetry wins. I love making found poems

found poetry making
love i found conversation
turned a poem i
making wins. found
a poem turned the
conversation found making love
love love i found
poems
conversation into a found poem
making haha into turned i
wins. i turned the
conversation into love

9/2/2010 Chungyen Chang

I keep having strange moments when I am listening to one song, and suddenly I start singing another song on top of it, and then it sounds like an awesome remix.

You’ve been friends with someone for a long time, and they are a pretty cool person. But you couldn’t really call yourself “good friends”, despite knowing them for years and spending more time with them than any one else you’ve known. Despite all of this time together, you’ve never felt “close” to them. You wonder why you stick around at all when this person barely knows you better than the strangers you confessed the stories of your suicide and sexual abuse to in a packed room last year. You wonder why, after so many years, it is still hard to even mention things like that with this person. You wonder why you are still friends with them when they barely know you better than the people who occasionally check up on you on facebook. 

It’s kind of funny, that feeling.

But sometimes there are moments when things just work, moments when you go out to Waffle House and you both get the same things every time and you know each other, just like that. And even if the conversation is a few sentences it isn’t boring— there is a potent kind of silence, an energy that connects the two of you together. You talk about family and words and gossip about high school douchebags. Then you finish his or her leftovers, get in the car, and go home.

Sometimes you are driving into the dark in their car with some music, and that’s all that is necessary. Sometimes you just waste the day together on pizza rolls and silly, world-conquering video games you never finish, and that’s all that is needed. Sometimes you talk about hot people. Sometimes you act like ducks know everything better than humans, but you always forget to bring bread to the ferry.

But you just can’t shake that feeling, that feeling you’ve always had that maybe he or she was friends with you just out of convenience…that maybe if there were “cooler”, more alike individuals to them, they would just up and leave you.

You know that you want to keep your friendship. It’s lasted longer than anything, really. It’s hard to imagine experiencing the big wide world without them. It’s just that sometimes, there are things that you clash on so terribly, and other times, you just want them to maybe talk about how they feel…just once. It’s hard when you are a person who feels and experiences the world so much. It’s hard to do that alone.

You don’t know how to tell them how you feel about all of this, so you leave it here, in an obscure little internet space that they may not even read.  They may not even realize that you are talking about them. So you leave a few tiny, precise little details— a diet soda can here, a paper car there…and you hope that they figure it out.