Coffee Shop

I first wrote this piece several years back, after which I tinkered with it somewhere else until it didn’t look or feel the same. So recently, I breathed it back to life. You can find the original here.

She whittles the simplest thoughts into rhymes, the words folding seductively into her conversation as my eyes are held ransom to the truth of it all. She casts spells in her adult lullabies and I am lost when she chases this with a look that brings to mind Rita Hayworth’s sacred blush. She’s a danger to the universe of logical things as she plies her witchcraft. I’m fixed to my seat like a lonesome traveler, endeavoring the stitch-work of her words on the unspent void. She steals my silence and spends it on the blustery stars and I feel like a boy on his first day of school.

We chew on saucers of bone china as they spill over with hard coffee and sugar milk onto our white paper placemats. I opine on how the moon landing was a hoax and the gaze she hits me with is a reminder of our very first conversation, when I bore witness to her Celtic summons that breathed life into my heart; I remember how I leapt inside her every word as if a dragonfly to water lilies.

She’s a classic love story whose legend is being written inside her every breath as the sun emits scandalous lashes across her ivory features. And then she tells me how Gene Rodenberry gets his mail sent into orbit so there must have been something to that moon landing after all.

I believe in magic as she weaves her song; a magic which yields its luscious sweetness into the ordinary pieces of my day. When she fixes on something in particular, I am the happy fool to her narration. She tumbles a heap of loose thoughts that behave very much like a runaway mosaic, after which she irons through the harmony until it’s swimming in the deep of me. She possesses the ambition of newborn planets and the despair of runaway galaxies and it always occurs to me too late that I have no defense when it comes to this brilliant reckoning.

Where once I ran with bloodless descendants of famous novelists who purchased heartbreak at wholesale prices just so they could doom the open market, now I spend my pockets clean with her. She has transformed all monochromatic obligations into a carnival whose tapestry bleeds with open roads and furious music and outrageous mysteries and mad, mad love.

We dine on this madness like tourists on Jupiter, and then my eyes and ears return to the cramped little brick and mortar nothing of a coffee shop we’re sitting in. The streets are a crush of stories fighting the predictable ironies of mortality as they march to work in the hopes of finding their Broadway while whispering to themselves anywhere but here. An odd foreign song emanates from a wanderer who manages to loose the purpose of this circus tale. This wise soul buys his time differently, in miniature panoramas of Everest whose peaks transform the gritty concrete plains with a reckless bass whose soul belongs to the true things of Shakespeare and Vincent. His melody skims stones across the elements that lord the visible world, painting ripples on the face of water in the same way Mother Nature flirts with Camus.

Sirens feed the urban canals with a preternatural howl that announces the tragedy of it all as midday traffic paints vibrations in needy movements like manic piano keys . . . punching through the darkness like feral children running wild in a strange forest. The seeds of guilt and dejection, confusion and hopelessness and rage sprout up from the cracks of the city like fiery trees out of some obscene nursery rhyme; the skyline provides convention in the form of a gilded frame as time births the angry sound that forever makes when it loses its way.

And now I turn to find her looking at me, her face is the same and different all at once. Her eyes are the first and the last and the forever of my dimension. Her voice drowns out the death of everything around us and my ears pluck the accent of her timeless melody. The conversation turns to me and her as outlaws, hopping from one unmentionable locale to the next and living on the American dollar and exotically named drinks. We spin a candied dew from borrowed scripts of long distance conversations as we toast to Warhol and Mother Theresa and wonder if their roads ever met. We come to the conclusion that everyone’s road meets somewhere.

Bowie’s voice scoundrels its way through a musty transistor radio behind the counter that’s nestled between a black and white photograph of Joe DiMaggio and a crucifix. In the song Bowie is telling us we have five minutes to live. We just don’t know it yet. That’s because we never know it yet until we catch up with it. A breeze soaked in midnight slinks its way across the cold tile and laminated floors of the coffee shop as Bowie’s tale lets us know the rumors are true.

All of them.

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