Beans & broccoli

A student living a student life, forgetting other student's names.

Beans and broccoli

 

�"to my unidentified muse

 

I built a breakfast out of the scraps in the fridge,

topping it with the last can of Value beans.

Cold beans have a certain poetry among wastrels,

an artful laziness that at the backbone of which

is a healthy obduracy.

 

I set out unambitiously.

There are several things I have to do

and the longer they are left, 

the greater the imperative to do them will become.

But I can't work without pressure,

the way a nail won't work without being hit with a hammer.

 

Work can never begin without a coffee,

black, two sugars, drunk lukewarm,

watching the traffic on Hannover Way.

The tepid coffee is an eccentricity acquired in college,

when an anxious mother would leave a fresh brew on the nightstand,

like a peace offering to a slumbering mythical beast.

 

Outside the library I exchange platitudes with someone I recognise from class.

She is doing a Lacanian reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray,

I mumble something about simulacra in The Atrocity Exhibition.

 

We have talked too many times to ask her name now

and this uncertainty lends an anxiety to my encounters with her that

I perversely enjoy.

 

I remember people by their faces, always their faces.

Hers appears to me in portraits framed

between the intermissions of a strobe light,

the first night we met,

a stop animation of head-and-shoulder close-ups. 

 

Lips parted, pursed or pouting,

a supple tongue darting out to moisten them 

or test lip balm,

she inclined her head, 

exposing her gently veined neck.

 

I'm distracted. 

I've lost the thread of what she was saying.

I smile awkwardly and walk away.

 

If I'd remembered her name 

we could have become friends,

might've dated,

become lovers.

She has an unplaceable beauty and

is cuttingly funny.

But could she tolerate cheesy beans on cold, steamed broccoli?