The Cafe of Silent Conversations

…the wild watery loneliness of his life

Starbuck as described in Moby Dick

 

You come to a popular coffeehouse because this is what you remember best with your father—coffee breaks at a German restaurant famous for European flavor and pastries. Today your days of ice cream and coffee with him are quiet except for your occasional questions to him about his brothers or maybe the house in his youth in Illinois. He never speaks of your mother. What star-crossed fate finally leads us down to the sea of loneliness? To role-play parts written for us long ago. Unlucky in love. Unable to talk. Your daughter asks about your girlfriend who has left. Whom you haven’t spoken to for weeks. What’s wrong with you two? she says. But the irony in her life is not lost. You close your laptop. Sip the last cold drops of a Blue Java grande. Damn the dead writers who plague your novella. Begin that letter you have been avoiding. Delete.

 

 

— Jeffrey Owen Pearson (Delaware County)

Jeffrey Owen Pearson’s work has appeared in The Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island, Maize and installed on the north face of the Open Door Clinic in Muncie. His chapbook Hawaii Slides was published Pudding House Publications. He serves on the Midwest Writers Workshop committee and has been nominated for a Puschcart. He lives in Muncie.

Indiana Humanities is posting a poem a day from Indiana poets in celebration of National Poetry Month.