at a coffee shop in Chili by Gary Hoffmannat a coffee shop in Chili I wrote a poem about a girl I've never met, a girl I've seen only in my mind a thousand times in bluest dreams of lost imagining a girl I've never spoken to but will some day a girl I thought about sitting there as I drank my decaffinated earl grey tea sitting at a circular table with a checker board printed on it and trying to flirt with the brown eyed girl behind the counter who doesn't go to college here or anywhere close to here and when she goes back in two weeks I won't see her again until the long, hot, humid days of mid-June but I was thinking about someone else, someone with eyes just as brown but tired with sadness, a girl drinking coffee at a diner I've never been to, a diner with off white tables and those metal napkin holders you always find in diners she was drinking coffee and not speaking to me simply breathing, sighing, thinking about the time we didn't meet at the Brockport diner, perhaps, or thinking about a lost love, someone she'll never again hold close to her, their breath intermingling as they embrace and kiss, as they feel each other's warmth and lose themselves in thoughtless ecstasy, their minds irrelevent as their bodies join, dancing, grinding like two giant millstones or churning like a gigantic printing press a printing press I saw when I was six years old and made all the more huge and loud and horrible because of it, that is how they once met and how they'll never meet again this is what she thinks so sighingly about, her breath blowing away the thin whisps of steam rising from the white porcelain mug that doesn't quite match the table on which it's leaving tan ring shaped stains, the steam softly caressing her cheek lovingly and so I wrote about her 01/24/2002 Posted on 01/24/2002 Copyright © 2025 Gary Hoffmann
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