Tale of the Missing Macchiato
Ghost of the Wood Pulp Plant
How to Stop Being an Ass
Tell me if you know this one. The journey for coffee is fraught with peril. The morning sky is falling but the baby cannot be yours. A stitch in time saves someone somewhere who didn’t deserve it. The early worm was once a late worm that went underground for so long it lapped the field. The Java Hut is open to those who know the way. Can you imagine not wearing clean underwear for the ambulance given the choice of that or a siren waking you from a dream? Yes, you held onto it. You used elbow grease even if it meant soul lubrication draining away. You know the drill. These pieces of you did not give peace of mind. The coffee line is a metaphor for your place in the universe. You are an immovable object meeting an unstoppable weariness. Be glad you did not write your own obituary disguised as a wolf in a nightie. Like that hipster in pajamas. There is no way to get ahead and pick the road less bedraggled. The princess bride is inside. The seasonal flavors confuse the yin and yang of selection. You knew it once upon a midnight weary. The magic mirror asks who ordered the cappuccino with sweet oblivion? The secret name is on the cup. It was you on another day. Only you didn’t answer the call.
My childhood is thick with the aroma of burnt maple syrup. I didn’t understand the sweetness of trees in their passing could overwhelm me. When I make pancakes for my kids I think about how the smoke hung over the “bad” section of town. My sweet tooth was challenged. The ghost of the wood pulp plant is sometimes confused with the ghost of the cement plant. The candy collected on Halloween is an unknown commodity when my parents would turn off the lights and lock the doors. They did not want me to live in fantasy. The ghost of my childhood is present in the bottom of the toaster and in the faraway look over white caps on any body of water. So many houses are for sale along the block I walked with you to school. We used to laugh about how we would escape this oven on the lake.
The instructions were kept in a drawer with other instructions. You would joke that the faulty merchandise did not come with enough warning stickers. Perhaps they were written in Sanskrit in the inside of your belly button. Perhaps no one noticed your love of placing your sibling’s hands on the burner. Your disguise was class clown, but you found a way to push buttons. All of the ones on elevators. All of the touch points that turned lovers into enraged lovers and ex-lovers. The lesson would be old school. Someone would need to spin you until you could no longer point a finger with certainty. Someone would need to care enough to hold you in place. Just long enough. This place. And tell you that you could be.
A veteran and long-time resident of Los Angeles, Martin Ott’s most recent book is Spectrum, C&R Press, 2016 (http://www.crpress.org/shop/spectrum-crisp/). He is the author of seven books and won the De Novo and Sandeen prizes for his first two poetry collections. His work has appeared in more than two hundred magazines and a dozen anthologies.
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