Coffee Tree

I.
Coffee hasn’t tasted much like coffee since my father left.
Before, caffeine was the enlightener, the least destructive of all drugs.
To the artistic or youthful mind the benefits far outweigh the overheads,
Often times those frequently warned “symptoms” bring beautiful inspiration.
It is this insight I beg to return to me now,
So that what I may scribe full meaning within in all words.
Habitually, when looking for this muse in cliché spaces where I have seen her before,
She has seen me and runs like a fawn, playfully two-steps ahead of me,
Allowing my thoughts to chase her,
Bare feet running through fallen Aspen leaves,
I catch her in the early morning,
Where she hands me a warm mug of auburn and
Begs me to caress her skin with my pen before the moon has attenuated.
But since the disappearance of my father’s soul from our dwelling,
the muse does not come around. No more visiting me late night
to make love with words while others in the house sleep undisturbed and unknowing.
She feels no need to kiss my face and run her fingers across my brain,
the same way which made my body tingle and shake all before.
Instead, if she comes to my room at all, she simply sleeps in my bed,
And the coffee keeps me awake to watch her toss, turn, roll…
I know she’s been somewhere else,
leaving me with a head of antlers,
A cuckold.

Jess keeps a close watch on my sugar spoon but, while moderating,
Allows me a liberal dosage of saccharine sweetness to dull the bitter caffeinated liquid.
She understands the need I feel to paint things around me the color of my trouble…
Yet I can sense I am grabbing her firmly above the wrist and pulling her into this drowning pool my father dragged and pulled me into.
Jess says he will come home…
She says that I am carrying a large boulder on my back against my will.
I can see her disenchantment as she looks down at her ceramic mug,
Coffee doesn’t mean the same thing to her either.
And I, the waitress asking if she needs more spoiled milk and pebbles,
The tile is cold as I get up to leave, feeling heavy
all trousers of earth with pockets full of rocks of burden.

II.
‘Freedom’, ‘liberty’.
As I sit up in bed waiting for the sadistic muse, listening to the distant bowling of thunder,
These words scribble themselves on the wall this showery evening- tiny scratches into the wall.
Dark red, like blood, saturates the wallpaper from the script as it traces the fragment across the partition,
a gentle knock on my door and a hushed calling of my name.
And I hide my head under the blankets in fear that I am as Julian of Norwich was -
To be ravaged by showings of forgotten Jesus -
But no, it is not simply my self plagued, or blessed,
by ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’.
These words echo like an anthem through every house in this country,
With different connotations, they are written on ceilings in kitchens,
On the television and across the headlines of the paper,
On car bumpers and town hall banners
In stars and bars, stripes and white hoods of knights,
Some believe we’re admiring the expressions meanings,
Some believe we’re simply whispering
“Might makes right, might makes right, might makes right…”

In the garage
under a swinging single light bulb on a string,
I sat on a red milk crate stolen from the back of the cafeteria at the University,
across from my father who stared back at me like a concrete slab,
His face melted into a brown, wise yet stubborn tree
whose trunk is too wide and set in it’s ways to be cut through or bend, or to sway with the wind.
His basic, emotionless stare tacitly implied his disapproval of what I said.
Between sighs and explanations on how this isn’t about politics I tried to explain
That this wasn’t about policy but it was all about survival and unity, harmony and realist international philosophy,
The tree moaned, its branches rustled,
a deep calm “I know,” melted from a hole in it’s trunk.
“It’s all about those options.” He said as he stood and shook his head in disgust.
The tree ripped itself up and carried it self out of the garage,
The leaves shaking like a hundred rainmakers,
Sod falling from its varicose roots like excrement, like earth hands waving goodbye
Or maybe reaching backwards, trying to grab hold of me to let me know….unity.
That night, the night he left,
as I lay in bed waiting for the morning I could hear the faint sound,
Of mice running inside of the insulation,
Words beginning to scribble themselves across the wall.

My father ran backwards through bullet spray for the idea behind those words
So often scrawled on looseleaf by speech writers, pundits, sophists, used for rhetoric but unlikely for the honor that those ideologies imbibe.
Impetuously he took to the battlefield to free those from ‘tyranny’,
Sweat from his beige brow fell down his eyes,
he took away the lives of all those Arab men
And all those oil barrels left the country willingly.


III.
A knock on the closet door, the muted calling of my name.
I lay in bed immobile as I continued to watch the words dribble, slow magenta down the wall
And slowly the brass door handle turns. My mother crosses the room, her slippers become boots, hardwood becomes sand,
I watch soldiers crossing the desert,
…becomes a small russet boy,
Walking with small steps across the hot, sand covered burgundy floor.
At bed side, his white eyes eat into mine,
Several voices in one say in a stable voice claiming hauntingly
“This is from your father”.
A small hand presses a green leaf into my open palm, little fingers, dirty with tree sod, lingering on my skin.
My neck feels loose and my head rolls around on its base,
It is extremely hot and I turn to the boy, staring at him.
He, too young to understand the events that had passed, smiles naively,
And I could see how men and children are misled.
I feel my eyes roll back in my head and before my blurred vision turns to black
The leaf slips from my hand and falls to minute feet, and I slur as my head falls loose
“options…”

IV.
Restaurant booths sit four but sometimes they sit two when really one is there.
For awhile after that night I saw no one…
There were people in and out of my vision and presence,
But I remained a solitary hermit in mind
just endless saucers and white cups full of flavorless coffee.
I placed tips of stones into the liquid like sugar cookies,
I’d pull them out and with them painted the world around me so dark,
and I felt as though Huntington’s disease was slowly wrapping its fingers around my brain and pulling my lobes apart,
brush stroke and brush stroke with geologic paintbrushes.
Until one day when the monotone Diner-Shiva was broken;
Jess got up the courage to sit herself across from me for the first time in weeks.
She walked over to the booth measured, like the boy who crawled across my bedroom
And she slid into the chair across from me slow.
There was four-in-the-morning-after-a-full-night-of-snow silence, the kind that is interrupted by the crunching slippers while getting the paper on the front walk.
She reached across the table,
pushing a cup of watery liquid towards me.
Footprints of high heels on waitresses, like knocking, like the child,
that little boy became Jess became the redemption of my soul.
For at first in baths of coffee I mourned my father’s loss -
His ability to have options disappeared for what I perceived, and is truly pointless,
And yet the child walking to my bedside,
Across the desert sand,
Across the diner tiles to this restaurant booth.
His hands, small and rough,
Became those delicate and adult,
And pebbles, became leaves, became tea.

It is the ability to change our circumstances that is our saving grace –
With no chance to determine our path, the ship’s current would be meaningless.
I knew than why Jess gave me tea, why the child gave me the leaf,
Why world write themselves in minds, walls, televisions.
Why people act for the idea of a word, even if the moment it is written is is determined coterminous,
How young boys and old men can be manipulated to die.
- for those who can, for those who do not know they can, for those forced–
We make choices.