Few poems about friendship start by doubting the word itself. Balachandran V's "Friend" opens with a claim about dictionaries: they are "books of revelation," because they tell us that words we have used all our lives may not mean what we assumed. The poem is signed Trivandrum, 03.03.2009, and what follows reads like someone thinking aloud, testing a familiar word and not liking everything he finds.
The first stanza is built from repetition. "You took them for granted / You assumed / You had always thought so / You thought that's what people meant": the lines get shorter and keep starting the same way, like a drumbeat of complacency. The accusing "you" then softens into "Shall we look up the word," which makes the reader a partner in the inquiry. The speaker's own confession is the poem's sharpest word: he has used "friend" "so / wantonly." That word usually describes cruelty or waste, so it turns careless speech into something close to a moral failing.
The long middle list shows what the speaker believed friendship was. Four lines begin with "Those for whom," "From whom," "To whom," "With whom," and the stacked prepositions give the passage the sound of devotion, of a whole life bending toward another person. Yet small parentheses crack the surface: "(mostly)" and "( I thought)." Even while praising closeness, the speaker has begun to doubt it. The vocabulary shifts too. "Ached" is raw feeling, but "relegate my personal priorities" sounds like an office memo, as if love were also a kind of administration.
The turn comes after the dash that ends "Your sorrows mine -". The poem admits that "I, have to be there / Separable from you." The odd commas in "I, have" and "I, am there" look like faults, but they work as stumbling: the self interrupts the sentence just as it interrupts the fantasy of union. The judgment is "Disheartening," and the climax is the triple "Not me, not me, not me in my entirety." The repetition sounds almost childlike, a plea to be known whole. The poem's logic suggests that friendship asks each person to play a role, "the friend that you want me to be," and the other must be doing the same. Nobody is fully seen.
What the poem does next is unusual. It never quotes a dictionary definition, even though it promised to look one up. The speaker supplies his own: a friend is someone to be grateful for, "Nothing more," and perhaps only for the fact "that we are there." The phrase "bottom line" is a blunt, almost commercial idiom after so much feeling, and it works as deliberate deflation. "Never to take each other for granted" also loops back to the first stanza, so the poem ends on the same phrase that began its doubt.
The final image ties these ideas together. A dictionary is not a lover or a mirror. It demands nothing, never pretends to be you, and simply waits on a shelf, "Somewhere reachable." The verb "grope" suggests a dark room and real need, and the last line widens the metaphor: we reach for meaning "Not of words, but of life." Friendship becomes a source of reference in confusion, valued for availability and not for total understanding.
Formally the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. Line lengths swing from a few words to long, list-heavy sentences, and dashes and ellipses mark pauses and trailing thoughts. The effect is closer to speech than song. Some of the punctuation is loose, but the looseness suits an argument being worked out while we watch.
The poem matters because it refuses the greeting-card version of friendship. It does not condemn the speaker's friends or declare friendship worthless. It lowers the ambition, from merging with another person to being steadily and gratefully present, and it makes that lowered ambition sound like wisdom, not defeat.