Photo Courtesy of Ruben ValenZuela/UnSplash
REPEAT AFTER ME
I am one of habit’s
most reliable creatures:
the latte - venti -
Starbucks -
breathing its steam.
This was me yesterday.
It will be me tomorrow.
I can bring you up to date
on the poem I wrote this morning.
And fill you in on the excitement
of tonight’s big event.
But how do I describe
the routine?
How can I make
it sound interesting
when it has no purpose
other than repetition.
I don’t know.
And the cup doesn’t seem to mind.
It warms my hands today
just like it always does
and always will.
And the light gilds the rim
of the same plastic lid.
And I could tell you about the muffin.
But I don’t want to bore you.
Oh well. I get it.
Repetition is not purpose.
But it is a kind of faith
that I will meet myself again
in this familiar moment,
that the steam rising
from a venti latte
can be its own quiet astonishment -
a little ceremony of staying alive
in the only life I have,
which is this one,
again and again.
MARKING PAPERS
To the teacher, dusk is
three parts geometry
to one part black coffee
Alone in the schoolroom,
he hunches over the stack
of finished test papers,
which amount to no more
than a landfill of half-baked logic.
He wonders why no one
grasps the concepts
that he has relentlessly
etched in chalk-dust hieroglyphs
on the blackboard.
Judging by their answers,
his students figure
the circumference was never round,
that a straight line wants nothing more
than to bend a little
and a square has
no business being equal-sided.
If their reasoning was a dog
it would be put down.
When he’s done with the marking,
he feels himself reduced to a lemma
that no one bothers to cite,
a factoid exiled to the footnotes
of their pervading dumbness.
So his mind creates
this convex polygon
for a temporary refuge
Its blessed boundaries
give such a good impression
of something that obeys the rules.
Here, he can still believe
in sense, in certainties,
be comforted by a place
whose angles only he can know.
INITIATION
My girlfriend – let’s call her Beth -
and her mother – Josie - went to get Chinese.
I stayed behind.
“You boys needs to get to know each other,”
said Josie.
We boys were me,
sitting nervously in a parlor chair,
and this guy Russ,
Josie’s latest special friend,
who passed the time,
when he wasn’t nodding off,
by giving me the onceover.
He was a carpenter,
was having problem finding work,
and took delight in showing off
the devil tattoo that stretched from elbow
to the wrist of his right hand.
Beth, in her “don’t repeat this” voice,
warned me how violent Russ could be,
that the purple patch under Josie’s left eye
wasn’t from too little sleep
but the result of a slap from his right hand.
I looked at his fists, the knuckles.
They were twice as big as mine.
He could have been a prize fighter
in my estimation.
But Beth said, he just hung around the house all day
had no interests other than drinking beer
and cursing.
I listened as he went on and on
about the construction business.
“They don’t want hard workers like me.
They hire these immigrant instead
and they pay ‘em shit.
They don’t even know one end of a hammer
from the other, some of ‘em.”
I nodded because guys like him
don’t want agreement.
They just like to have an audience.
Finally the women returned,
hauling bags of Chinese,
laughing too loudly
like people do sometimes
when there’s nothing in their lives
to laugh about.
Beth handed me a carton of lo mein.
Then she smiled that smile
that made me think the agony
of time spent with Russ was worth it.
And the out-of-work carpenter
lifted his beer
toward no one in particular
and said, “hell, kid…you’ll learn”
And maybe I would
but not that night.
The smell of fried rice filled their air.
Beth’s hand dropped down on my knee.
And the devil on Russ’s arm…
it closed its eyes, fell quiet for now.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Midnight Mind, Willow Review and the Pennsylvania Literary Journal. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the MacGuffin, Touchstone and Willow Review.
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