Diana Darby ** "I V" ** Intravenous

Dollars Into Dimes

It’s 2:15 and I slept like crap
last night.
Leg cramps.
And the ice tea I drank around 5:30 to help get me through
traffic school didn’t help either.
In the middle of the night
I wandered through the house like my dog.
Staring out of windows.
Walking from bedroom to bedroom
like I had never been in them before.
Searching for ghosts in the closets.
I finally fell asleep around 3 a.m.
only to be woken five hours later by the thunder.
Now I’m at Bread and Co. eating
a peanut butter chocolate chunk cookie and having a cup of hot tea
(I brought the tea bag from home).
I’m trying to convince myself
that if worse came to worse,
I could be happy working in a place like this.
But the longer I sit here,
the surer I am
I never could be.
I hate the disco rhythm music.
The quasi-cool techno mix
that says, “I’m hip”
coming out of every corner of the room.
I could never be happy wiping tables and asking people,
“May I help you?”
when the truth is I don’t really care.
Of course, neither do the people that work here.
They are all just robots,
taking orders without thought,
just like the Nazis,
grabbing bread and bones
and twisting them into lunch.
They’ve lost their identity in the chicken salad.
The guy behind the counter in his purple apron
and white shirt,
looks just like the guy standing next to him.
Twin doughboys.
Each with the same haircut.
Each with no clue
as to why they are here.
And by ‘here’ I mean
on this planet.
Why are any of us here?
It can’t be just to sweep and bend and shine
and smile and ask and change
dollars into dimes.
There has to be more to life than that.
Doesn’t there?
Or is it just because I’m drinking Zen tea?