My Friends Only Like My Poems About Them
My audience engagement strategy is now just flattery in verse.
Priya sent me eleven fire emojis for a poem that took me four minutes to write. It was about her sneeze.
Not a metaphorical sneeze. Her actual sneeze, which sounds like a small dog being stepped on by a slightly larger dog. I scribbled six rhyming couplets on the back of a chai receipt while we waited for our order, and she laughed so hard she had to put her forehead on the table. Then she photographed the receipt, posted it everywhere, and captioned it “the greatest living poet.”
Three weeks earlier, I had spent nine days on a poem about my grandmother's hands. Nine days. I rewrote the ending fourteen times. I read it out loud in the bathroom to test the vowels. When I finally sent it to the group chat, the same Priya replied, “nice :)”
Nice. Smiley face... Nine days.
That was the day I discovered the only reliable law of my writing life: my friends do not like my poems.
My friends like my poems about them.
Once I saw the pattern, I could not unsee it. The villanelle about time and rivers? Two likes, one from my mother. The limerick about Ankit's parallel parking, which once took eleven minutes and involved a traffic cone he still denies hitting? Forwarded to three separate group chats. Someone printed it. It is taped inside his car now, laminated, like a small shameful certificate.
So I did what any poet with a fragile ego and a full social calendar would do. I gave the people what they wanted.
I became the group's court poet. Sana's lasagna got an ode. Dev's failed sourdough starter got an elegy, complete with a funeral stanza in which we scattered its flour to the wind. When Ritu passed her bar exam, I wrote her a victory ballad and performed it standing on a chair in a restaurant that politely asked us to leave.
Birthdays became commissions. Someone's cousin offered me actual money to roast her fiancé at an engagement party, and I am ashamed to say I accepted, and I am more ashamed to say I killed.
My audience engagement strategy, if you want to call it that, was flattery in verse. Business was booming. My rates were a coffee, a hug, and the brief warm delusion that I mattered.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about writing about friends: it works because people are starving.
Not for poetry... For evidence. Evidence that someone was paying attention on a random Tuesday when they said the funny thing, wore the ridiculous scarf, sneezed like a stepped-on dog. A poem is a receipt that says: I saw you. You happened. Somebody wrote it down.
Meanwhile, my real poems sat in a folder called REAL POEMS, which is the saddest folder name I have ever typed, and I have a folder called TAXES 2019.
I entered the grandmother poem into a monthly poetry contest mostly out of spite. If my friends would not read it, maybe a stranger would. Strangers, I reasoned, have no reason to say “nice :)”. Strangers are honest because they do not have to sit next to you at dinner.
It did not win... But a judge left a comment I still have screenshotted: “The hands are doing all the work here. Trust them. Cut the last stanza.” I have read that comment more times than I have read some books. It felt like being seen by someone who owed me nothing, which is a different vitamin entirely from being liked by someone who owes you brunch.
Then Priya's engagement ended.
Not dramatically. There was no cinematic rain. There was just a Tuesday when the ring went back into its box and she showed up at my flat with a tub of ice cream she did not open, which, for Priya, is the highest possible alarm level.
“Write me something mean about him,” she said. “Really destroy him. Rhyme his name with something unforgivable.”
His name was Rohit, which rhymes with more than you would expect. I had material. I had years of material. The man once described my poetry as “a nice hobby, like her candles.”
I sat down that night to write the roast. What came out instead was a poem about Priya at nineteen, dancing on a hostel roof during a power cut, holding her phone flashlight up like a stadium light, absolutely certain the world was about to be wonderful. About how that girl was still in there, under the returned ring and the unopened ice cream. About how a sneeze that sounds like a small dog is really the sound of a person who has never once in her life tried to be smaller.
I almost did not send it... It broke my only rule. It was a poem about her, yes, but it was not flattery. Flattery is safe because it asks nothing of anyone. This one had honesty in it, and honesty always costs the writer something. I had once read an essay about why safe poems lose, and I remember thinking it was about contests...
It was not about contests.
I sent it at 1:40 a.m. Then I put my phone in the kitchen so I could not watch it being read.
She called instead of texting. That has happened maybe four times in fifteen years of friendship.
“You absolute idiot,” she said, in the wet-voiced way people talk when they have been crying and are pretending they have not. “I asked for a roast.”
“I know.”
“You made me feel like a person.”
“Sorry.”
“Don't be sorry.” A pause... A sniff. The small dog sneeze. “Do one about Rohit's haircut, though. As a chaser.”
So I did. Both poems exist. She keeps the haircut one on her fridge, where guests can enjoy it, and the first one in her wallet, folded into eighths, going soft at the creases like a currency note nobody will accept but her.
My friends never wanted poetry. They wanted proof that someone was paying attention. It turns out those are the same thing, if you write it honestly enough.
These days I still take commissions. Ode to a new puppy. Ballad for a promotion. Sonnet for Sana's second, objectively superior lasagna. But I smuggle the real stuff in now, one true line hidden inside the jokes, the way you hide a tablet inside a dog's treat. Nobody has caught me yet. Or maybe everybody has, and that is exactly why they keep asking.
Last month I finally posted the grandmother poem on a community wall for poets, where nobody knows me and nobody owes me kindness. A stranger commented, “This is my grandmother too.” Another wrote, “Cut the last stanza and it's perfect,” and I laughed alone at my desk, because apparently the entire world shares one editor.
And Priya? She found it there, three weeks after scrolling past it in our group chat. She sent me eleven fire emojis and one line: “Why didn't you ever show me this one?”
I did, I typed. Then I deleted it, because the truer sentence was shorter.
“I'm showing you now.”
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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