They took away our coffee pots;
You know the type:
Big forty-cup, with chrome,
The kind you’d never use at home.
They said a weapon
Potentially lurked there,
Were it heaved or water thrown.
Now in a land of synthetic dreams,
Of a cup-of-soup or instant tea,
Another compromise
Slips in to burden me.
I may suck the caffeine
Of paper packets and sleepless nights
And write endless narratives
Of wasted years and trampled rights,
But, try as I may, as I burn midnight oil,
And heat up my verses, and curse my toil,
My thirst is room temperature—
My water won’t boil.
Ah, what emotional masturbation
Brews in the grounds of this pleasure dome;
Drinking tapwater coffee
And thinking of home.