Ordering A Full Breakfast In The Age Concern Cafe Poem by Jean Bernard Parr

As I enter
it smells of lightness
of the thin boned and
airship-ribbed
Am I too heavy for this?
I can feel the spaces
vast like spaces between planets
this grandmother and the
toying child, a child comfortable
with age, they are atolls
haloed with whiteness and
among this lightness I order
a breakfast, slow in coming
the heat to make it feels slow
in coming among the icy
whiteness, its as though
the microwave is in the death zone
of some howling peak
where all are bone-chilled
among the sparseness of
nursed tea mugs eeking warmth
into supplicating hands
and I sense that I have interrupted
some secret flow of thing
there is something of heresy
in ordering a full breakfast
in the Age Concern café
something that points to transgression
the full breakfast might be too full
among the Spartan outlay
on pale tables where the poor
test the rich tea biscuit for
tensile weakness in an even
weaker brew. I have transgressed
some unknoweable law, I have
failed to see how they struggle
to produce a block of temperature
the opposite of glistening ice
in a far off country
tong- unloaded on a summer wobbled day
there is stooping behind the counter,
whispers, a convocation of sorts
an offering up takes place and
the white enamelled reliquary
emits a bee drone and brings about
a hush.
O the fullness of the full breakfast!
expectancy of plenitude! How it
weighs and drags me down
to an ocean floor of guilt
as I watch the child draw on notepad,
poundshop thin.pencil grasped in flytrap
grip, flintlock knuckles white tipped
and I can feel all around me the reluctance
to release the temperature needed
to heat food, the tables are full
now of hands cupped around tepid teas
and a woman rises and dumps a stack
of slender books down on a bowed shelf
'love stories...' she excuses with the
faintest smile. Love stories! Kindling
found in the wilderness for the heart
that foundry-cast engine that needs restart
I glimpse the compression
of our collective sadnesses into a ball
the span of eons shrunk to seconds
then its bubble-gone, the full
breakfast forgotten as in a little while
with the stealth of melting ice, the bingo
game begins, and I sit at my table,
apostate, salt and pepper loom like
cooling towers, I listen to the liturgy
of numbers called and ask for forgiveness
hoping for another epiphany someday.