Flat White Afternoon
By Alan Gillis
Forget about
it for you’ll
never win,
never hit the jackpot,
move in
to a solar-powered eco mansion
and modest
philanthropy,
become a panjandrum
of diaphanous pleasures
but must sink
or swim
beneath mood-
mutable skies, coconut
milk clouds,
in the shadow of high flats,
low sales, bright fronts,
strung crowds
of literally miraculous
people in
expensive skin
like bed sheets
you would wrap yourself in
and which you now touch
lightly as you enter
this café
past a clutch
of mitching schoolgirls
with pierced noses
and Tintin
hairdos who look
at you as if to say
is it dial-a-dickhead
day in here?
or maybe that’s aimed instead
at the guy eating flatbread
with five thousand
friends on his phone
who types with a grin
all is well with the world,
when all is not well with the world —
the burden of debt
as your granny might say
heavy as sin —
although who would begrudge
this incense
of crushed coffee in steam
this clatter and chatter
latex flowers under halogen lights
and who’d demean
that woman
with her small child wiping
the small child’s chin
to the delight of a lonely
well-off older person
or w.o.o.p. —
I believe they call them
woopies — at the next
table over who scoops
two shaking spoons
of sugar into a steaming
cup then begins
to call her son
Oh my lost Son
asking after her granddaughter
while the mitching girls
swagger out the door
— look, one forgot her
phone — ah good,
someone caught her —
and who would begrudge the yin
and yang of this moment
sitting here
coming or going
anyone and no one
here or somewhere else
stuck nowhere and flowing
in the mix like everyone
for you are blurring
below indigo and ink-dim
skies as time passes
by like steam vapors into
the run-of-the-mill gray
coat you put on
pausing, before leaving
to meet this falling day
which as your granny
might say is the only
day you’re in.
Source: Poetry (September 2015)