What to Say Upon Being Asked to Be Friends

By Julian Talamantez Brolaski

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, "What to Say Upon Being Asked to Be Friends" from Advice for Lovers, City Lights Spotlight No. 7. Copyright © 2012 by Julian T. Brolaski. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.

Source: Advice for Lovers (City Lights Books, 2012)

Biography

Poet Julian T. Brolaski is the author of the collections gowanus atropolis (2010) and Advice for Lovers (2011). Xir chapbooks include Hellish Death Monsters (2001), The Daily Usonian (2004), Madame Bovary’s Diary (2005), and Buck in a Corridor (2008). Brolaski’s work often explores transgender and gender-variant experiences through linguistics experimentation, including the use of gender-neutral pronouns, etymology, and . . .

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