You didn't crash — you were handed a parachute. It was a soft landing, but it's still a landing somewhere you didn't mean to go. Two poets, five centuries apart, on what it's like once you touch down in the friend zone.
Julian Brolaski's sonnet is a masterpiece of compressed feeling — part Shakespearean, part thoroughly contemporary. The speaker is sick with love, tongue-tied, febrile. And yet, when asked to simply be friends, they say yes — even knowing that friendship would "infect me killingly." It is gracious and devastating in equal measure.
Then Mirza Ghalib, writing in 19th-century Delhi in the ghazal form, takes the wider view. He was never meant to love and be loved, he tells us. His beloved is faithless — and paradoxically, that faithlessness keeps him alive. If she were faithful, the joy would kill him. He is dying in slow motion, perpetually, and he finds a bleak kind of poetry in it. Two poets, one condition: the friend zone as a place where love goes to pace in circles, beautifully.
What to Say Upon Being Asked to Be Friends
Why speak of hate, when I do bleed for love?
Not hate, my love, but Love doth bite my tongue
Till I taste stuff
that makes my rhyming rough
So flatter I my fever for the one
For whom I inly mourn, though seem to shun.
A rose is arrows is eros, so what
If I confuse the shade that I've become
With winedark substance in a lover's cup?
But stop my tonguely wound, I've bled enough.
If I be fair, or false, or freaked with fear
If I my tongue in lockèd box immure
Blame not me, for I am sick with love.
Yet would I be your friend most willingly
Since friendship would infect me killingly.
Julian T. Brolaski
We share poems in good faith and with full credit. A Letter to the Poets →
No, I wasn't meant to love and be loved
No, I wasn't meant to love and be loved
If I'd lived longer, I would have waited longer.
Knowing you are faithless keeps me alive and hungry.
Knowing you faithful would kill me with joy.
Delicate are you, and your vows are delicate, too,
so easily do they break.
You are a laconic marksman. You leave me
not dead but perpetually dying.
I want my friends to heal me, succor me.
Instead, I get analysis.
Conflagrations that would make stones drip blood
are campfires compared to my anguish.
Two-headed, inescapable anguish! —
Love's anguish or the anguish of time.
Another dark, severing, incommunicable night.
Death would be fine, if I only died once.
I would have liked a solitary death,
not this lavish funeral, this grave anyone can visit.
You are mystical, Ghalib, and, also, you speak beautifully.
Are you a saint, or just drunk as usual?
Mirza Ghalib · Delhi, 19th century
We share poems in good faith and with full credit. A Letter to the Poets →