Too Much Coffee

Another poem from college, written at a point when I'd had so much coffee that I discovered caffeine's psychotropic qualities.

Brave champion of the post-post modernist age
Don thy helm of a caffeine induced dementia.
Twould be no grand loss,
Twould be but sanity.
A meager price for string cheese words and troubled dreams.

Midnight movies and a promise that shines dull
in the optics of our frail forms.

Twere you to look upon it with spider like eyes
Faceted with a paper bag kaleidoscope.
Two faced, grinning moon roof
Snoopy’s ears catching wind
These are the best years of our lives,
deal with it kid.

Listen to my fingers doing nothing.
They are numb, can’t you feel.
Some friend you are!
Where is your empathy?
Where is your sensitivity?
Where is your goddamn understanding?!
Don’t you know that I can’t feel my hands.

I envy your lips.
They’ve touched those lips I dream of.
What right do they have?

Hello, Goodbye, Wait.
I think I remember you.
Come from those shadows.

Anthropology

An oldie but a goodie from my college days.

It’s Saturday afternoon, not long after twelve.
I’m alone in my house, reading page after page
    of facts that are fading
    of faraway lands,
the blinds shutting out any participation
by the world living out there.

I’m learning truths, sterile and stiff,
    about tribes I will never meet,
    about monsters I will never fear
    about Gods published too many times to believe.

I could teach you to cook,
just like they did in the old days,
    how to farm
    how to dance
    how to court a widow or virgin
all without insulting her father.

The author of the text I am reading
guarantees this is the way
that these people truly did live.

Six previous editions
    were slightly too wrong,
    were innocently errored,
    were redeemed in the newest edition
And he’s almost ninety percent sure
of the accuracy of his new chapters
of customs
of practices
of “myths.”

Dream: 12/27/09

Captain Rousseau led Catherine by the hand through the doorway and up the stairs of splintered wood. The bridge of the Incomprehensible was completely enclosed by a glass roof and felt more a greenhouse than a command center. Where there weren’t paths of good old fashioned, planked wood, the desk was soil and sod. Tall ferns sprouted from the ship in spots and a small muster of peahen meandered about the grounds. Catherine had now been awake for more than 30 hours straight and her grasp of reality felt as slippery as a greased lemur.

“Mr. Rousseau, I really must insist that you let me go to my cabin.”

“Miss Rousseau.” The captain corrected. “I was born, and remain to this day, a woman but, to be honest, piracy is such a heavily male dominated occupation. I find that the ‘men’ under my command respond better to a captain with a certain level of masculinity, hence the goatee (which works wonders by the way.)”

Catherine was too tired to be surprised. “Be that as it may, I must, again, insist that you let me go rest. The world is slipping and becoming watery in my head.”

Miss Captain Rousseau sighed, “Very well, young miss Catherine. When you step off the bridge follow the hallway on the right and your cabin will be the fourteenth on the right. But, please, do mind the minotaur.”