Smell The Coffee

Where are they?… 

 

The girls he read about as a child…The daughters of Eve who lingered in delis and cafes, sipping their finely brewed toxins, burrowing deep into the imaginations of writers whose names resound in empty literature classes where frizzy haired women and gender confused men, fought behind rimmed glasses to be heard above the din of legends, whose very thoughts reverberate in our collective consciousness and swallow the very social norms we blindly follow.

 

Hemingway…

 

Tolstoy…

 

Dahl…

 

Where are they?

 

Where are the brave faced women whose ashen faces spoke volumes of beauty and as much about intellect, at a time when intellect is not so much found as hunted, and burned at the stake for the simple crime of overpowering ignorance, and patience is no longer a virtue, ignorance is, the brilliant are no longer heard, the foolish are. Could darkness be warded off if light was renounced? Would the blind ever see the light if they dare not open their eyes? Where are they then? The Western youths, Walt Whitman spoke of? Are they pioneering this age of arrogance? Where no one backs down from a fight? Can you blame them? Sticks and stones may break their bones but clicks and space bars never will.

 

Are they here?

 

The daughters of Eve who bite the poison apple, instead of whipping out their camera phones, to spread their sin before it consumes them, it’s a shame God doesn’t have as much online presence as the devil and all of his legions, scouring the earth, their wings tucked beneath them, sitting at widescreen LED monitors. While our guardian angels fly open skies, beneath them creation slowly dwindles, from the inside out, while we still look on, for asteroid collisions and alien invasions. 

 

 Is it worth it?

 

Is there space at your table? Is this chair taken? Should I move am I getting in the way of the picture? While the sauvignon breathes, its shame faced depiction has been portrayed in every corner of the virtual tendon. How long has it been since you tasted the food, any more than your followers on Twitter or Facebook? They say a picture says a thousand words, can a picture say just three or a million? Sometimes all you need is freedom of expression, to say nothing at all or only three words…

 

I love you…

 

I am sorry… 

 

I hate you…

 

Please don’t go…

 

Please come back…

 

Thank you God…

 

When were you last in love?

 

Not with tagged pictures and a relationship status, or wall posts in nonexistent places. When were you last in love; like a soap bubble headed for disaster? Like two subway trains facing each other in a railway tunnel. When did you last touch; without a cursor telling you where you’re headed? When did you last pry open her lips with delicate maneuvers, like a fighter pilot working the skies. When did you play hot or cold with a breathing landscape of skin stretched over bone and flesh tucked into crevices of flawed detail and bad habit? When did you last hold hands in the sea; let your dreams run free, without brush strokes vanquishing your every imperfection, like a choir of catholic school girls renouncing the devil and his every misdeed, it’s the creator we’re now renouncing, with Photoshop filters. 

 

If I see you in a quiet corner…

 

Can I sit next to you and tell you my name? Will you take a minute to hear me out before you Google me and find me too commonplace? Will judgment day come at the instant you find that my profile picture isn’t quite as exotic as you would like it to be? Are you justified in passing judgment, in presenting every stranger who ever found you to be in resemblance to the girl in his dreams, with a standard so high that they grasp at the edges of a cliff weighed down by the gravity of dissolution? How have we fallen? So far away from grace without even a remnant of our glory days, just soldiers waging wars against the very thread we’re bound in but when we all fall apart, what will hold us? 

 

Who will cradle us?

 

 What will linger if not the touch, or memories that we so fondly nurture, will ours be the SOS anthem, or just another podcast, looking for recognition? When will we open, eyes closed shut in fear of the light, our pupils contracting to focus intently, searing the flesh off of the men who walk among us that we place on pedestals and push off of, just for Sunday night cocktails, to give us another reason, to rally around and be lonely in companies, numbering to tens of millions. Have we really put an end to the Irish witch trials, aren’t we branding them still, burning them at the stake, to find any reason or just for the sake, of religions we don’t practice when no one’s looking, charades we put on to fit our imperfections. Do we really think that an all-day masquerade will help us hide everything we’re shamed of? Isn’t it sullen? Don’t you feel the loneliness? Why look for aliens in far-away places, when we have them right here living, under rocks, behind masks, openly hiding, pulled down by words we’ve attached meaning to. Why is it that we fight the words, yet instill their meanings in our children? Don’t we still understand that a rose called by any other name is still as fragrant but a thorn called by any other will still pierce us?

 

S**t.

 

F****t.

 

Pig.

 

Retard.

 

N****r.

 

Chinky.

 

W***e.

 

Schizo.

 

How vile our intentions…

 

So if I see you in a quiet corner…

 

Will you breathe me in before you find that I’m not perfect?  Will you see how I note the pitfalls, before I jump in, screaming profanity and waging wars, only to find I’m among the legion? Fighting against my own causes, I’m a pioneer of my own anarchy, but I don’t mean it.

 

I’m just a writer, writing a story that will never be heard of. I’m not Hemingway but I can tell you stories, of great men whose thoughts reverberated in empty classrooms, whose brilliance falls now only on deaf ears, like lightning crashing over a mausoleum. Maybe if they got it wrong, when they wrote, that the perfect girl will be nursing an addiction to caffeine… and poetic genius… maybe you could at least sit with me, spend a few minutes, even if it’s only just to smell the coffee. 

Reviews

[Frieda P]

This is a quirky, unusual read, unusually good. Much enjoyed! You need to serve a poetic cuppa coffee with this brew. Breathing. Excellent.