Cafe

1.
…I come to this cafe
to read the signs of madness
on the ever-scared faces
of the by-passers

I hide my eyes between the lines
of the accountants’ book of their lives
watching their shadows
to read their thoughts

then one of them asks to sit at my table
pretending to chat (but in reality
starting an endless monologue
of his invented life
spitting out names/dates/facts)
I pretend I’m listening
& even making notes
I give him the desired nods
& smiles & sighs
in the right spots of his self-forgetting narrative
about himself
(a lecture on self-pity)

a couple of hours pass by & he
looks me in the cold reptile eye
for the first time
shivers
jumps up & leaves never looking back
nor saying a word

the next morning he drops his job
asks for divorce
or they find his corpse in the bathroom
smiling sardonically

the next evening
I come to this cafe
to read the road-signs of sadness
on the ever-sacred faces
of the by-passers
passing away…

2.
…One day you come in & pretend
to listen to my legend
smiling politely
but I can see the dimness of your eyes
while you float far away into your own
memories & cannot notice
how I knit words into a transparent cobweb
& you’re the one to be caught up
next

I look at your pale fingernails
& memories overwhelm me
images chaise me
extinguished voices & dead faces surround
our little plastic table
which now seems ephemeral
(this cafe tonight is a mirage oasis
in the desert of eternal yesterday)

did you know memory is the best hunter?

you may run away to a different continent
or into a different pair of arms
but it’s only fair there’s no difference
in where you are
you may hide in creativity
or in the daily routine of food/money/sex
you may rush from being a misanthrope
to becoming an altruist (the top
egoist of all)
but you will never escape from memory
never erase your shadow
for even having blown it all up
in your own chased mind
you can never hack the security system
of other people’s merciless database

forget it
although people tend to remember nonetheless
(in their loneliness they gasp
for a juicy bite of someone else’s privacy
falling drunk with their twin-drunkard’s blood)

relax
don’t you remember
those who carelessly approach us
in their naive praise of Mnemosina-Bachus relationship
become alcoholics anonymous
losing their identities
together with their personalities
& personal lives

dramatis personae!
they tend to crowd in clubs
of our forgotten shadows
long after we stop recalling their names
(names indicate a person still exists)
they come to our cafe
to lose their names & lives
in our eyes…

3.
…they call me Monster & you
call me Wonder
they always mess up words
& call you by the name you gave me
whereas I am the one who calls
you by your real name
that they have given me

(you have no preference in being
one or the other
you like both titles)

at night I think you’ve no
preference in anything
for al is equal to you
& all is pretence
(it’s the weird quality of a liquid
adopting the form of any vessel
for the sake of equality)
but the light comes to blind me
of seeing the blind you
& then I don’t care whether
you need my fire
at all

I just burn

you know I would have turned you
into a poisoned steam
if I could have let go of my freezing pride
but you are right to not care, too
as long as I
don’t make your stream boil too hard
(if we both had at least one heart
for the two of us
we’d have it boiled & eaten
by now)…

4.
…I look at you across the table
& see no physical resemblance
between us but in the blank glassy lizard gaze
of paranormal sanity they often
mistake for madness
we are spiritual twins
(for it’s dubious the likes of us can
possess a soul) & thus
both have no preference
in terms of our material pretence
in our predatory games with blood & flesh
(granted a prey is fresh enough)

you are a hunting shadow of the past
I’m your reflection in a broken mirror
lie to me as I do to you
(but we don’t even care enough to lie
beside each other
in the grave we dig)…

5.
…but listen
we both buried many souls
forgetting voices/faces/names
but they continue to exist
somewhere in their created Limbo
of their memory about our past
from time to time they come
to this cafe & vomit their pain
on the eternal glass that we have set
between us & them
(ironically, the same glass distinguishes
me from you
& simultaneously it unifies us in our
perverted brotherhood)

remember the seven of us
dancing on the shore of a lost forest lake
by the chanting fire?
(soon only two of the seven will remain
& we both know who they will be)

back then, under the young spring moon
we’ve been drunk like fish
that came up to the surface to watch us
laughing insanely
at the early Christians mutated
into the urbanist pagans like ourselves
(the water was boiling with fish eye-balls
& open suffocating mouths)

I remember the Bachan fire in your eyes
& my Menadian song
& our mutual enamoring with Pan
& if you don’t recall it Dyonisius
I’ll pour some more blood of the past
into your cup to help you
regain your blazing sight…