One Evening in a Café
When thoughts don't take you far
and you sit silent
Tremulous
staring at the veins in your hands;
when the chariot of your imagination
won't carry you to passageways lit with glimmers of insight
and you sit silent
Tremulous
gazing at the smoke encircling your wrist:
when you do not answer the woman who greets you
as she lets her shawl fall
into the vacuum of the evening
and you sit silent
Tremulous
staring at the fateful events written in your coffee grounds;
when the new émigrés stroll by
arm-in-arm with their adorned ladies
chattering on about how time flies
and you sit silent
Tremulous
gazing at the mysterious wood of the table;
when you don't keep anyone's company
and can remember nothing of the war
but a horseshoe
or bullet holes in a curtain;
when, one evening in a café
faces pass before you like a copper fog
and you hear cymbals clashing in a distant desert
or walls crashing into hypothetical canals;
when, one evening in a café
that blind singer's album
starts to play,
and everyone suddenly sighs;
then you rise and walk
To where the hatchet
leans against the tree.
and you sit silent
Tremulous
staring at the veins in your hands;
when the chariot of your imagination
won't carry you to passageways lit with glimmers of insight
and you sit silent
Tremulous
gazing at the smoke encircling your wrist:
when you do not answer the woman who greets you
as she lets her shawl fall
into the vacuum of the evening
and you sit silent
Tremulous
staring at the fateful events written in your coffee grounds;
when the new émigrés stroll by
arm-in-arm with their adorned ladies
chattering on about how time flies
and you sit silent
Tremulous
gazing at the mysterious wood of the table;
when you don't keep anyone's company
and can remember nothing of the war
but a horseshoe
or bullet holes in a curtain;
when, one evening in a café
faces pass before you like a copper fog
and you hear cymbals clashing in a distant desert
or walls crashing into hypothetical canals;
when, one evening in a café
that blind singer's album
starts to play,
and everyone suddenly sighs;
then you rise and walk
To where the hatchet
leans against the tree.
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