The first cup of
coffee opens the blinds
on windows shut
by a hypnagogic foray
laced with
lavender hymns of jabberwocky.
You might as
well have eaten mushrooms.
It cranks out
warm air from the furnace of lungs
stoked by
neurotransmitters run amok
and setting your
brain on fire.
You’re in no
hurry to call the EMTs
as long as your
pulse takes its morning jog
in sinus rhythm
and stays in the high double digits.
I mean,
otherwise your blood would freeze
like the trickle
of stream that’s the property line out back.
Why ruin a good
thing like the legal buzz you have going
since waking is
a zero sum game.
Somebody has to
win, and if it isn’t a mug of chemicals,
then the hearse
might be pulling into the driveway about now.
It opens the
stops of a pipe organ,
makes life
full-throated, Beethoven’s seventh
rather than a
threnody on the triumph of your pajamas.
In fact, it weren’t for dark roast—lattes need not apply—
the word
threnody would not have entered this poem.
Suddenly there
are ideas.
Perhaps you will
write a book or fall in love
or talk to
pigeons in the park.
Let’s be honest:
everything’s on the table
after two sips,
maybe three if you overslept.
And it’s cheaper
than therapy, right?
Why not give
yourself a good talking to
rather than pour
all of your hard-earned words
into the ears of
someone with a fifty-minute attention span?
I see you’re
finally taking my meaning.
The beans from
South America are kicking in,
and your pupils
are a bit constricted but focused.
You have had to
part with your very last dream,
the racy one
about Salome’s many-colored veils
now evaporating
into early morning sun-steam.
~William Hammett
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