Your Friend, the Writer by Jeff Weddle

Your friend, the writer, needs groceries: 
kale wine ground beef potatoes beer bread 
bourbon spaghetti & sauce gin rum ham 
mayo absinthe milk Snickers fish sticks 
vodka scotch rye ayahuasca peyote 
weed and Spam.
 
Your friend, the writer, needs readers 
love hate notice explication a good woman 
a bad woman a dog a cat a publisher
 an editor and a bookie with a heart.
 
Your friend, the writer, needs a priest 
a rabbi a hooker a nun a Smith and Wesson six shooter 
fifty boxes of shells a dozen Spanish orphans 
a plot of land and a shovel. 
 
Your friend, the writer, needs earthworms 
pickles shears rope caviar statues of Napoleon 
poison pens cigarettes laughter and bombs.
 
Your friend, the writer, needs your wife 
your daughter your blood skin bone flesh 
muscle soul a quick nap a good night’s sleep 
a beating heaven and hell. 
 
Your friend, the writer, sends his regards 
confusion congratulations regrets condolences 
phobias love ambivalence spleen and contagion. 
 
Your friend, the writer, wanders in 
wanders out stares at the ceiling 
bites his fingernails scratches his ass 
smells his fingers yawns and giggles 
stares at the mailbox 
tries to remember your name 
and doesn’t write anything at all.

Jeff Weddle is a poet and writer living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He won the 2007 Welty Prize for Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press, and has also received honors for his fiction and poetry. Jeff teaches in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama.