Cold Cut Poetry

Moved by this blustery, blue Sunday afternoon, I wrote a poem in Moonbean today about escaping an all-consuming drive to re-decorate, being slightly deranged from a bit of cabin fever, and the consequences thereof.

God bless me, there’s starlings strewn atop the wire by my window! Grabbing my keys, I counted ten by twos.

Sitting like an electrically-charged posse, they’re just a tiny gang in the cold. When I leave the house, they loitering on wires, gables and lamp posts. Flighty punks in the empty laneways.

There’s some shelter in the coffeehouse. The man beside me says he’s just a peasant, and is much less threatening…until he starts repeating “Gunpowder, gunpowder – no. …NO!” And makes the waitress laugh.

I pull out a pen and notebook to bubble my awareness: So it’s coffee and all-jazz radio. It’s twenty after four and Sunday. It’s listening, sipping, stopping, leaning; against the wonky wooden table.

I cup my ‘joe with two hands and hear someone say “Who can beat Rosemary Clooney?” And I hear “Do you know Grace? I swear you know her!”

Only sometimes. She eludes me when I’m hungry, or when the arm beside me failed to reach out in the dark, and I was cold. The weight of the drama crown may be hefty, but if I have sniffle in bed, cold and stark, then no, I don’t know Grace.

Four forty-five and the coffee is still hot. I’m not really thinking, just unsure if I want to write more or just read. The book I have is historical fiction, and this poem is about the present. Yet the narrative is all the same – some old story. Some longed-for company or resolution, an imagined happy ending. The disappointment lingers in me like the  smell of dog shit at the bottom of someone’s boot (not mine). Plain as day, it’s there, awful and embarrassing.

I know I’m scowling. Goddammit. Scratching the paint off the table doesn’t help, but I do it anyway.

The man beside me burps loudly and snaps me back to all-jazz radio and the sound of the espresso machine. I sigh and  take a good chug, being finally delivered to the last few dregs of Devils’ Brew.

That’s the only resolution for today.