i’m having coffee
i’m dreaming I’m having coffee with Whistler’s mother
i’m out of the frame to the left meeting her gaze
i’m scratching a knuckle with my nose
i’m not listening to my wife while gazing out a window
i’m imagining our small distant sun rising over the horizon of Neptune
i’m having coffee   —paper cup with a heat sleeve
i’m playing with two small stones, twiddling them in my palm like
…………Queeg
i’m remembering throwing stones through a neighbor’s bias
i’m sitting, but you don’t want to know where
i’m wondering if death is simply the mirror parenthesis of birth
i’m lying in bed staring at the ceiling slightly chilled, I need another
…………blanket
i’m fooled again
i’m not fooled again
i’m having coffee    —dark roast, the only kind
i’m wrong about a lot of things          too many
i’m dumber than a stump but smarter than a breadbox
i’m still wondering what it’s all about Alfie
i don’t care what it’s all about, I’m picking asparagus
i’m inside a cosmic question bouncing off its walls
i’m having coffee   —Colombian this time, but dark, as I said…
i’m puffed as a peacock but simultaneously beside the point
i’m over the hill but still climbing
i’m loose as a goose and tight as a fundamentalist’s ass
i’m unknown, thank god— remembering Elvis
i’m anonymous as a red leaf in the Berkshires in Fall
i’m having coffee gazing over the rim of a mountain watching a
…………small cloud glide
i’m as unbelievable as your average Mike or Mohammed
i’m at least as believable as your average Mike or Mohammed
i’m beating my head against the wall again painlessly
i’m taking an aspirin just in case
i’m having tea , green, trying to take coffee’s edge off
i’m under the gun but still over the clover
i’m not sure
i’m cock sure
i’m as fraught with anticipation as I was when I was twenty,
………….just not as often
i’m remembering something, but quickly change channels
i’m thinking again of a Dylan line —so many good ones
………….blowin in the wind time out of mind

I’m having coffee
I am not having
I am not not
yet
.

Jim Culleny, May 2009
painting: Whistler’s Mother
—by James McNeill Whistler