Really the Best Poem ever ... coming from someone who just sprayed Bragg's Amino Acids on their Dinner!

People Who Eat in Coffee Shops

by Edward Field

People who eat in coffee shops
are not worried about nutrition.
They order the toasted cheese sandwiches blithely,
followed by chocolate egg creams and plaster of paris
wedges of lemon meringue pie.
They don't have parental, dental, or medical figures hovering
full of warnings, or whip out dental floss immediately.
They can live in furnished rooms and whenever they want
go out and eat glazed donuts along with innumerable coffees,
dousing their cigarettes in sloppy saucers.

"People Who Eat in Coffee Shops" by Edward Field, from Counting Myself Lucky: Selected Poems 1963-1992. © Black Sparrow Press, 1992. Reprinted with permission (buy now)

The Good Terrorist - still

I will begin this blog by saying that I heard the poem by Dorothea Tanning on NPR http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ this a.m. I have a special place in my mind for Tanning because of a research project I did in Art History on her in college. Surrealist painter from Ill. and NYC- married to max ernst - interesting. Connected again to thoughts of college is the book The Good Terrorist - I am still reading it. wow - a month later - I am only a third through the book. I seem to read about 10 pages a day. This explains how the month passed so quickly. It brings back many memories to college and being involved in food not bombs. Making soup from food that was collected from health food stores and distributing it to some homeless folks. The main character Alice isn't exactly doing this (although she often cooks soup for her housemates after their political rallies). I am seeing her more as a home maker type involved in the renovation of a tenement in the UK that supports the dwellers who participate in their political agendas. Just describing the book here - people - don't get too sleepy....