Coffee Shop Solitude

You perch in blue silence
surrounded by broken
voices reverberating
from generational vocal
chords—

Their broken words
are all the silence
you need.

They are numb of mind
like your Plath book,
inanimate on the table,
counter height with
salvation.

Yet, the book speaks
to you, and you listen.

Maybe their chattering
words are full of life,
full of meaning,
and your mind is
a meaningless still-life,
a bowl of oranges.
It may be the other
way around, but like
evolution and relativity,
you can’t prove it.

As you glance out of
the window, an apparition
of your grandmother appears.
She is sitting in her room
fifty miles away, solitude
in an old folk’s home like
Dickinson’s fly buzzing
just before death.

God, this is what you
were born to do—sit
in coffee shops and write.

Plath tells you that
this is now,
and now,
and now,
but your last word written,
now, last thought recorded,
breathe, is now dead like
your Plato father in a casket,
Plato mother stooping to
kiss his cheek like noone
and anyone, cummings.
Words and thoughts are dead
like the time you vomited
when he died—dry on
the bathroom floor jerking
with life and breath, a curled
fetus with a freshly cut
umbilical cord.

Your lost word, thought,
went where he went, perhaps.
Your written words and previous
thoughts live in a grave next
to your Plato father, real Plato,
and deceased humanity,
a pit of atoms and sound
waves and existence.

Perhaps your words are
elevating from this pen
into Death’s great time warp.
Your mother is catching them
with a butterfly net, and they
are laughing, and somewhere,
somewhere there is a summer
sprinkler, and the sun
is laughing with them.

And oh God, don’t cry in
this place, in front of these
people. You are not quite
that inhuman, Leviathian—
not yet that numb (as a fossil).

You sit here, still launching
words into her net, into
the comparable time of
a conceptual heaven.
As a tear falls from your
conceptual transparent
eyeball like Emerson,
you are no longer
a transcendentalist—
but a time traveler,

and you exist.
They exist.
The butterflies exist.