plain black coffee
25 july, 2007

there is a place where wistful people sit,
with plain black coffee from their kitchen shelves:
plain coffee, since the sadder that they get,
they grow to be pale ghosts of their past selves.

I hate to say the obvious, but I
once was a wistful coffee-girl. I feared
the woeful gloom; when I was one mere sigh
from fading into nothing, you appeared.

still: sometimes, in a flash of backwards thought,
I disregard all things I’ve learned from you.
I hesitate to love, and once I bought
some plain black coffee, just to paint me blue.

but though it’s hard to leave the past behind,
you make me switch black coffee for red wine.