My Friend Chip's Spiral Notebook

He wrote from bell to bell
at the black lab tables in
the back of Mr. Kegley's room,
so many words and still adding more.

Mrs. Moutvic hung a gallery
of his work on the art room wall;
etchings of space stations,
cyborgs, intergalactic derelicts.

He asked me to write a movie
with him about Vietnam.
We split it down the middle.
I wrote the first half, him the second.

Mine followed the rules:
I got into scenes late and ended them early.
I showed and didn't tell. The pages
were clean and properly formatted.

His looked like a homeless man's
autobiography: wild manes where pages
been torn out, rambling monologues,
a vision of a mushroom cloud.

Garf, who was Chip in a wig, sun-
glasses and a Beach Boys baseball hat,
stopped an atomic bomb with
the sound waves of his guitar.

We should have made that movie.