Breaking: Coffee or Snapchat

By Ihor Pidhainey

Coffee culture is dying,
The elderly in walkers inhabit
Pods and spaces and places,

But the hours close at five,
No workers, owners have claimed,
So it might just be the case,
But like the blue-plate specials
At 3:00 pm, our age shows.

We were late to the scene,
(Venice 1647, London 1652, Boston 1676)
But reveled in all-night baringly
Empty tables, wobbly with paper foundations,
What kind of sense @3AM
But without walkable phones
Or portable laptops
Or anything inhuman and inhumane,
We drank bottomlessly
Like fish in an aquarium
Or toast under a hot sun.

I met her in a coffeeshop
Might have been Steve McQueen
In a been-there-done-that shrug
Walking impotently among the youth
Of Highburial Ash. (No, Haight-
Ashbury, remember my 60s trivia)
Older and wizened, legendary and washed-up.

I saw Brad Pitt and Leo Dicaprio as old men,
Were they not babies on a screen just yesterday?
Sweet home alabama died yesterday,
And a man was murdered for smoking, yesterday,
And speaking a couple of innocent words.
(My great-grandfather shared the same fate)

So here I am in a coffeeshop,
Trying to catch my breath,
As the world spins in traffic patterns
Foreign to my brain and the joys
Of days gone-by are no longer going bye.