Coffee Sips 3 - 2/9/2002

the glass we look out of
makes the traffic drive into your reflection.

Both through and against,
inconsistent play
of imperfect vision.
Can't properly merge face

with street.
Your nose is tipped by
changing red green traffic
signs.

Over cups we talk passionately
of dial tones and now fashions.
Instead of porcelain cups,
glass ones with brass handles
grace other conversations:
but ours are
wide-rimmed, squat, white -

distraction: you repeat love while i wince at the car
narrowly missing your ear lobe.

Wouldn't it be easier
if i just looked into your
face, instead of insisting
on this half turned nonchalance?

ceiling lights and street lights remain
trapped in the web of reflecting glass.


When glass curves , what holds our shillouttes in place?

Only noisy conversation.

I will concentrate on writing in spite of the busy schedules and nine classes worth of essays to mark. And yet I haven't been highly productive recently. This 3rd installment in the Coffee Sip Series (unless you count that Ode to the Kopi Siew Tai) was written really long ago - some time in Jul last year i think. The physcial location was Olio at Weelock Place. Was staring at a couple having coffee next to the window and how the oddness of the perpective meant that the cars and reflections of cars from the road running perpendicular to the building seemed to run right into them. It wasn't even a good illusion - you knew that the cars were on the outside. but I looked hard and the lines seemed to merge. And so it is with writing - what we gauge naturally in the "real" world, distance, depth, perspective, angle, 3Dness - often becomes ruthlessly contorted when we place/ capture them on paper. And the ill-defined physicality translates into an emphasis on interpretation. And thus the physical gets tangled up with thought and emotion. So the possibilities of paper -continuous(ly) (e)merging.

"You dog! Upon my honour you lye ..." John Webster