Coffee Sips

Coffee Sips

10/22/2001

This comes from a another section of the poems I've been writing. I pretend they actually fall into sections because if ever i put them in a book they'll work this way. Anyway - note the "clever" rhyme (enough of the Lit Poser stuff already ...): "Language Slips" and now "Coffee Sips".

Anyway, this section is based on a desire to write a concrete kind of poetry. Based on experience and observation rather than abstractions and ideas merely. So since I spend lots of time at coffee places, I deceided one evening in June at Starbucks' Orchard Parade Hotel, to write coffee poems. Obviously this immediately belittles the poetry: where is your grand subject? Writing in spite of the repetition and commercialism of coffee places is the challenge.

I was waiting for Ms Tan then and it was hot plus stuffy ...

A Kind of Hipness

A kind of hipness
is found sitting alone -
watching your own
impressions of aproned
baristas spin a yarn
in downtime coffee
world.

in all the concrete
spaces i sit at and
sip, i haven't said hello
to happy people
waiting alone. Cause
that would spoil
the silent mantra
chanted by glassy
eyed gazes.

Satuarated with
coffee gloss, staring
listlessly before our
kind of hipness sets in,
we sing

"the song of
black eyed susie*".

* - a black eyed susie is a variety of geberra that has completely white petals but a black centre. I remember this because Ms Tan explicitly wanted these for table decorations for our wedding dinner - but somehow these were not available. The image is of a single shot expresso - concentrated, dark, in a white cup.

A poem about waiting and watching and trying not get involved. The relationships are hung out in restlessness: no one speaks. Except the coffee people who are supposed to be working. Everyone is cued into their own cup of coffee, as a convenient distraction, as a convenient accessory for "a kind of hipness".