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WRITING - APRIL 2007

After Coffee - It was Free Coffee at Starbucks Day.  I rarely drink coffee - it makes me drop everything and write, and I often don't have the time to allow myself that luxury.  But I always thought it was just the caffeine...   Turns out I might be mistaken.  The title was something to throw on the poem just so I could save it in Word.

***

After Coffee

Coffee haunts me. After
the first sip, I taste the smoke
of seventy two hours of
roasting, soaking the sun in another
country. Coffee is a transplant,
to be accepted or rejected
to be taken in any manner I please.
It has no say in how it feels.

The second sip is full of tears,
the ones for my father I never
let him see, when I wanted to grow up and be
just like him. I bit my nails and
wore casual polos and only dated
boys I could beat up. Acrid black coffee,
the same way he drank it
black and strong like his hair, his car,
his arms, his daughter’s clothes.

Three sips, for three lovers, three
coffee fiends late night early morning
Tim Horton’s making every effort to
stay awake. I remember every minute, every
touch and taste and texture but coffee kisses
linger but little in memory.

less concise than tea, fragrant as roses
I take my cup with a moment of silence
and a slice of cake. A Sunday morning
with a newspaper, establishing a ritual I don’t need
but want badly, I want the caffeine to get to me
make me remember or forget or belong
make me, at least, something like what I’ve seen in others
but all I get is rushed. I’m not made for coffee.
The last drops trail gracefully to the bottom of the cup
and we are both oblivious.
 

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Sixteen - ghazal - I hated being a teenager.  It wasn't just the lack of authority and the uncertain body chemistry.  I felt stuck in the formula of high school, the homogenization that stamps out identical students like car parts.  It wasn't the blatant pick-picking of childhood; this kind of subtle squashing was conducted on all sides, from teachers to administration to all the fellow students who bought into it.  I didn't.  I couldn't.  But I had no group to belong to at school to cushion myself, and so pretty much found school irrelevant to my life.  My best friend at the time had graduated from the same high school seven years earlier; I seriously needed his support, as an insider who understood.  To this day, I'm grateful.

***

Sixteen

 I wish I destroyed my childhood in my year of sixteen
My holding pattern life only sighed that I was sixteen.
 
Like the Sam Cooke song, giving my heart with eyes all aglow
But I was too young to fall in love at only sixteen.
 
I knew I knew nothing, or at least nowhere near enough
Even though I was grown in some lands, here I was sixteen
 
Sixteen in America, I could have tentative sex
I could have children but no one loved a mother at sixteen
 
Gradually nothing happened, no matter how I tried
I made gay friends who couldn’t see me when I was sixteen.
 
And all I wanted was to be something besides myself
Beyond small town high school, young, naive, sheltered and sixteen
 
I’ve aged fourteen years since then, and I have much more to give
This petulant student doesn’t give a thought to sixteen.

*** Rules for ghazals:  A ghazal is a southeast Asian poetic form, brought to India by way of Persia.  Rumi was known to write in ghazal form. 

1: Each line must have the same number of syllables - usually from 11-15. 

2: The first two lines must have the same ending.  Afterwards, each two-line stanza ends the same as the first stanza.

3: Each stanza must be able to stand alone, as a poem in its own right.

4: No enjambment - that is, each line must be independent.   Often (but not always), each line is a complete sentence.

5: The last line must identify the writer in some way, usually with a pseudonym or, in this case, a role (petulant student).

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