Flying Star 15 Aug 22

Old men type texts on their smart phones
with one finger and no emojis.

A middle aged woman slices her eggs
with knife and fork.

All but one of the laptops are Macs.
Most of the coffee is diluted with cream and sugar.

From the Quick Fix station
Dean gets a scoop of ice cream in a coffee cup.

Twelve indoor tables are empty—three full.
Twelve outdoor tables are full—three empty.

For the fifth time in ten minutes a person
pushes on a glass door that does not open.

Two young women use the cafe as their office—
write code on screens that look similar to 1980s DOS.

Lack of Patriotism

The dead lived here once.
Their ghosts are quiet and content.

This is the garden they tended.
Here stands the stonewall they built.

This chimney has three hundred years practice
channeling smoke from fire to sky.

There above the hearth rests a musket
once wielded in the cause of liberty.

When I fetch candles from the pantry
I brush against all those ghostly hands fetching candles.

But I am the first in the line to drink tea.
I feel those departed coffee drinkers frown in disgust.

We dig the well
deep under white sands—
not deep enough
to escape the click-click-click
of the geiger counter.

Your desperation is so great
you claim out loud
that coffee and boiling
neutralize excited particles
and half-lives.

We dig the well
deeper than the old ocean bed
and the calcified remains
of animals that pre-existed
dinosaurs.

I pour you a glass
of water so clear
it bridges back to an era
when this land mass
was equatorial.