On Waiting Tables

My day begins with scooping ice.

 

9 hand-held garden-shovel-sized scoops

per bucket

3 pale blue buckets

the color of chloronic swimming pool water frozen over.

4 empty bins of steel that sweat when full

and need to be filled

before the doors open at 11.

 

I begin my day at 10:30 shaving away at a glacier

that solidifies the taken peaks every 15 minutes with icicle teeth

avalanching in tinseled sheets as if some deranged dentist

had gone mad pretending to be

anything else

and needed to a place to refrigerate the evidence.

 

I like to light a smoke by 10:55.

Watch my sweat steam on the concrete

so my mind too can evaporate

for a moment of laughing gas

 

before two women on their lunch break

order a sweet tea, slice of lemon,

well vodka tonic, slice of lime, and I’m staring

back at bins again.

 

It must be nice to be a cube of ice

melting on a stranger’s lips,

digested,

a real chance to be someone else

somewhere else.

 

Maybe one of them is a dentist.

Maybe the other scales glaciers.

I’m sure both of have buckets to get back to.