DRINKING COFFEE...

Context is all-important in how we experience our lives. Nothing is absolute, we can only exist in a state of temporary constancy while floating on a sea of ever-changing relativity. Situation and circumstance are coloured by the environment of each unique experience while the people who are around us, beside us, with us and against us, will make of the place a paradise or a hell. Time changes our contextual framework and the relativity of our increasing years dilates or contracts our memories making of the past, as viewed from the present, a distorting mirror. I mentioned yesterday how I visited Brisbane and how it brought to my mind a previous existence, so distant in the past and yet quite familiar. I viewed the familiar places as though for the first time. As I looked through the lens of times past my present reality and the new context had changed them all…

Drinking Bitter Coffee at the Café of Broken Promises

Quite by chance, I went by the Café
Where once, a lifetime ago, we had sought
Shelter from Autumn rain.
I wandered in – half expecting to see you smiling,
Beckoning me from that same booth
That we had shared, while grey afternoon wore on,
And rain, thankfully, kept falling...

We shook the rain off our hair – I remember –
And how we laughed, as the tabletop was spread
With hundreds of diamonds; raindrops that caught
The pale yellow light of the bare bulb above,
Shattering its puny glow into a million sunrays
That illumined richly for that moment
The deepest cellars of our souls.

We sipped the steaming coffee and it was sweet nectar,
Although we clean forgot to sugar it.
Our legs brushed under the table
And your eyes promised me a hundred happinesses;
“Tomorrow...” you had whispered and I only smiled,
My silence more eloquent than a thousand pictures...

I order coffee yet again this Spring morning
And though the sun shines brightly outside,
I am sure I can hear the drumming of rain on the tin roof.
I lose count of the lumps of sugar
I am drowning in my cup, but each sip of coffee
More bitter than the one before it.

I stretch my legs beneath the table
Encountering a bottomless abyss,
While from the neighbouring booth, someone laughs,
And says quite loudly: “It was yesterday!”

By chance, I find myself once again
Drinking bitter coffee in some city Café;
A tawdry, cheap, noisy, smoky place,
Where one would never go to more than once...

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 See Kerry's Imaginary Garden with Real Toads blog for more poetical offerings!