PAD Day 6: On Friends

 Today's dual prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a poem with the title, "________ in the _________," and (2) write a poem that takes a phrase or section from someone else's piece of writing, and uses those words in order as the first word in each line of that poem - "a variation of an acrostic poem," as Maureen Thorson calls it. I look at, especially if I use a poetry source, as a variation on the "golden shovel," a form invented by Terrence Hayes where the last word of each line is taken from the words in another's poem. In any event, I will use this prompt as another opportunity to write a poem for my other project, powm based on the the lyrics of the rock band Elbow. The epigraph of this poem is my source, and as you will see, each line of my poem begins with a word from that epigraph, used in order.

Looking in the Rearview

(A "word acrostic" poem)
 
Dear friends
You are angels and drunks
You are Magi
Old friends
You stuck a pin in the map I was in
And you are the stars I navigate home by
―Elbow, "Dear Friends"
 
Dear departed, dear still there,
friends who have been part of the journey,
you all got me here today.
Are you sleeping, are you awake?
Angels and demons
and graybeards and ghosts,
drunks and teetotalers, scoundrels and saints,
you all are indispensible, you
are worth more than any gift of the
Magi, more than any billionaire's cache.
 
Old days sometimes fade like photographs, but
friends, you are the afterimage in my eyes,
you are the memories that make me smile,
stuck in the brain like
a favorite record, a butterfly on a
pin. I am still driving
in from the wilderness, dust on
the windshield, creases on the road
map, and I don't know exactly where
I will rest, but I do know I
was in the greatest company
in all the towns you found me in,
 
and you have my gratitude,
you clouds in the sunset, you who
are a two-lane highway through the plains,
the rest stop, the last gas, the
stars that knock me back at night when
I gaze overhead, the same ones I use to
navigate toward the last leg of this trip,
home by breakfast, home
by morning.