#554: A Friendship Ghazal

All my best friends are musicians, it seems, which is no surprise,
Cool cats who sing, strum, pluck, pound, mix, and write, not a surprise.

I married one some 39 years ago and we’re still together, drumming.
I did the easy part, but she gave birth to one, a great drummer, surprise.

Guitar players, who are also literary guys, or painters, or readers–a bonus–
with partners who sing, or who don’t play or sing, but are fans. No surprise,

it turns out that I am friends with lovers of music as well, who may have
other talents, who are simply just good people to be with, full of surprise,

who are listeners, deep listeners, who notice things, look for nuance, can
appreciate a groove, a riff, the great lift of a good bridge, a lyric surprise.

Bass players by the boat loads, I have never met one I didn’t like, and
while I have lost some of them, they are ever present on the down-low surprise,

a couple for which, and one in particular now, I feel a kind of brotherly love,
an abiding care, an almost daily thought, a deepening concern through the surprise

and sometimes ugly vicissitudes of living, and even at great distances, an entire
continent away. My life has been uniquely blessed with bass players, no surprise.

Of drummers, I have been close friends with a smaller number, and singers, even
fewer, but one I have come to love, an immense and platonic love, not a surprise,

given her verve and humor and wildly ecstatic way of being in the world;
it is hard to imagine a universe without her in it, would be the end of surprise.

My writer friends, they too sustain me, and their art is a kind of music, I’d say,
but my best writer friends have to live some distance away, visit less often, surprise.

I find it difficult to be sentimental, soppy, tender-hearted in a poem, but this
is a ghazal, which, if you know, you know, is a kind of love poem, a flirty surprise.

So D.J. M.J., a.k.a. Jarm Dawg, or by both first and last as if they were one word,
michaeljarmer, concludes his love poem to his artful Besties All, with surprise.