"Espresso"
The java joints of Lafayette are landmarks
of the Land of Buzz, smoky as beehives
but sublimely lazier. All by themselves they inhale
and exhale, huff and puff, and generally jazz
each other like competing hipsters,
everybody prettying and skinnying themselves
into cardiac collapse like so many stockstill
runners. PJ’s, CC’s, the Rise ’n’ Shine, Les Joies Manquées,
the Coffee Crutch, Cup d’Etat, and Cafe Cut the Crap,
these are places that diss New York and glum
Seattle, seashore cities floating so unjustly cool
that coolness can’t matter as it does here.
To be the new joint on the block and quick
with a cup of jeaux au lait, and overflowing
with a beatdown air of sophisticated third-hand bull
means more than all the put-on eyepatches and canes
of Grammaw Europe. No one here has ever heard
of absinthe, or wondered if the squinty fellow
in the corner was James Joyce. No one sat here
and wrote Godot, Woyzek, or Good Soldier Schweick.
No one has to. It’s already been done by someone
sitting on his ass drinking coffee in plain view.
He knew how great it was, but he was far too cool
to get excited. He just yawned and got up, and went
and bought a Coleman Hawkins album, and made love
to a girl from Senegal for the rest of the weekend. Then
they both went back to the coffee shop, saw separate tables
of friends, and parted company forever. That’s for me,
boy. It’s all mine, part of the service anywhere
in the world I sit and have six cups of coffee. I say,
let’s have another Ethiopian Harrar. Let’s have
some orangepeel espresso, like in The Godfather. Sit down,
I say, this is a lot better than ever going anywhere. Everybody
sit down, there’s time enough for everyone’s best story.
—Jerry McGuire (and don't miss: Venus Transit)
Nice.
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