portrait of a poet writing the wrongs

portrait of a poet writing the wrongs

With steer-blank stares the bars' dead eyes look up

to watch the flustered waitress, her greasy hair

in coils on her flushing face. She stoops

to pluck the pieces of ceramic strewn

about in islands on a golden sea

of IPA, and across the bar a woman moans

about the service here, demands a drink

that better be on the house. His pen 

in hand he watches from his corner seat.

He does not find it hard to write their wrongs: 

to trace the shattered pint with ballpoint ink

or write the lines of seedy nights that crawl  

their way across the woman’s furrowed face — 

he does not find it hard drag his pen

across a jagged edge of all that’s chipped

or cracked until his words are seeped in blood 

and pulse on top the page. But words go still
when all the world is right.

Like Tuesday at the coffee shop, when they

had brought his muffin on an egg-white plate —

the nuts on top were perfectly arrayed

like five-sides on a dice, the top as puffed

as cotton balls that dab the painted cloth

of summer sky. He couldn’t help but laugh

that morning, knowing in that moment that there

was nothing he could write to pick and move

that perfect plated pastry to ink, and he deferred.