Enter SONYA.
Mark each occasion with the theme blasé.
Circle all the words that really mean blasé.
Skin a touch of buttermilk white and dinner crème-blasé.
A woman, for every man, makes an idle dream blasé.
A woman, in portions, pulls away; tries for her sake not to seem blasé.
I’m a chemical tainting the mental stream blasé.
I’m an old friend watching the painter treat the theme blasé.
Enter three Customers who sit at an open table.
My concept of working as a team: blasé.
The corrupt presentation of food can make it seem blasé.
Disgruntled Customer, you mistook me for a woman of extreme blasé.
Enter BRANDON and BILL, side by side, cooking meats.
Brandon. There’s love in a spatula, Bill; we’re here to create
something beautiful:
1. I noticed a man
In absent lull near the door.
Then he noticed me.
2. Revolving like sand,
He began lulling slower,
A smile like debris.
3. I wrote this haiku
I don’t think you understand;
Now you notice me.
Let a grey day that wishes to stroke
with a different palette feel free to do so.
I’m the figure in its watercolor;
I only wait to be escorted into each day’s memoirs.
He takes a sip from his plastic cup of water.
Enter JULIE and TATTOO ARTIST. She sits in his chair, and he begins to tattoo her shoulder.
Julie. Hard in a skepticism of this world’s magnitude
to admit that you believe in God,
or at least in a man you can’t see,
touch, or talk to, but who
has an ultimate authority over you,
who tells you when to sleep,
winds your days, peels your destiny off
like an orange rind.
Hard to explain why you’d give
anything to never see him
but to know that he’s there
waiting for you to rock your own life’s crib
from its pocket of wet sand.
The scene fades with the buzz of the Artist’s needle.
Enter CHERYL.
My hands shuffle plastic
red cups and white plates
only a fork nearly drops on
my way to the dish party.
I grab the two dollars,
tell the busser how
one couple’s use of unwrapped
straws, their joints stuck,
forms the topography
of booth four’s littered palms.
I blame this on hands, pale
as whipped cream, lap
the lip of this table
like a lover in the mood
for Philip Glass.
I hear the jukebox pull the moan
from Michael Jackson’s Thriller;
He put a spell on you,
to make you
I’ve over six years of slip-resistance
I’ve seen folds of wet bread
tread my hands
so many times under a sprayer
that steel sinks have become maws
in my dreams, sucking the water
from my plates of whirled peas.
My IBC nightmares
where my lungs fill up with cream soda
and I’m weeded in a pool of
syrup to my nipples
trying to bring root beer to more tables
than I could ever handle alone.
In these dreams, I don’t scream,
I just speak from the mouths of burst butter packets
tornadoed around my ears,
but its only when I sleep
that these walls could get closer
so I’m touching both sides
with spread arms, I’m shot dead
in the chest by a ketchup bottle.
