Caffeine Damage
I clutch my favorite
cup in the morning;
sweating.
eyes dilating.
waiting.
fingers tapping
against the scratched
formica table top.
Mr. Coffee
takes his sweet devilish time,
I count each eternal second,
waiting,
for the glass pot
to fill to ten cup capacity.
Just a few heavenly swallows
of the brown
to pop, perk and prod
me awake in the AM.
Waiting...
-- Kevin Zepper
Grounds
Grandma Reise read
coffee grounds, Scandinavian fortune-telling. She scryed grounds
because she never read tealeaves, she didn't care much
for tea. She played her parlor magic for a short while, when she ran
out of good fortunes to deliver; money, marriage, travel, job, birth,
she started making fortunes up. There were too many real fortunes to
hand out, dark stars at the bottom of a white porcelain universe. Grandma
made up fortunes her customers knew were pretty wild, like the one
she told a second cousin about a live bear hunt, in Idaho,
near a lake, running into a woman, who looked like Veronica Lake, and
how show business was really this cousin's life anyway, working as
an usher at the theater and all. After a laugh, Grandma received payment;
the cup was on the customer. And after any reading Grandma's smile
straightened while she straightened up, rinsing out the portent in
porcelain, dark grounds crying as they filter down the drain…
-- Kevin Zepper
Java Dive
Out of bed and chicken skin feet hit freezing wooden floor. I’m
half awake and sleepy seeds still cling to the corners of stony,
dreamy, eyes.
I’m running slow-mo on a go–go, co–cold November
morning, focusing with chilly will on the coffee cooker to pour
out, from a pouting
spout, a mean
slow stream of steaming java.
Shiver and strut, peel off paisley p.j.’s and jump into cup: sproing
off the breadboard diving board, feet together, palms lock in prayer overhead
and
kerploosh, 9.5 Olympic swan dive into the mug. I swim and swoosh around the
inside hemisphere of the stoneware, dive under the hot, murky brown and feel
stinging
caffeine peeling eyelids awake.
I poodle paddle across the ripples, crossing back and forth, from one lip
of cup to other. Australian Crawl, climb up curving handle and cannonball,
throw
sienna over scalp, splash and spit like a greasy, grinning grey goose. Just
plain roll in it till half the java’s all over the kitchen floor, towel
off with a big paper coffee filter, drain the cup in two guiltless gulps.
This is a
poem in Kevin Zepper's first
small collecton, "The Fifth Ramone." Dacotah
Territory Press published the chapbook in 2003.
