Broken Barstool Dreams
by Anne Maltempi
Mirrors on the walls reflect the rainbow bottles
stacked on the marble shelves, stained glass,
silver spouts ready to pour their sweet toxin at a moment’s notice.
You can taste the smoke in the air;
gray it looms, fogging, dimming the fluorescent neon bulbs
set along the sides of the mirror
The small orange heads of every cigarette burns,
through the heavy mist, hundreds of mini fire spots,
like lightning bugs on a humid summer night.
Each cigarette is the companion to a broken dream,
a shattered vision of cubist Picasso pieces,
reflected back crushed in the mirror.
The Loud Lush lost love, sips wine-spritzers, sitting to the far right.
The forever-single sixty-year-old bachelor dulls
his loneliness with a vodka martini up.
The guy with the missing teeth works for the courthouse;
no car, taxi drivers know him by name,
downs Beefeaters every night, “Hey Joe, put it on my tab!
Then all those who still don’t know why every night
they end up at the same bar;
and ponder their place and purpose.
The Bartender remedies these ills.
Like a mad scientist he concocts his potions,
red, green, blue test tubes.
The magnificent opiates put the pieces together,
temporarily the image makes sense,
the reflection is whole.
Then the buzz wears off,
reality reels you back into disarray.
Could I get another shot?
Back