Next Door Café: The Poem

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A poem "with cautious, slightly energy-sapped enjambments" recreates a bar's atmosphere and patrons. Carmine Starnino reflects on the inspiration for the poem and his own  writing process in "Next Door Café: A Poet's Musings."

NEXT DOOR CAFÉ

We were bored, so we stayed. The days knocked deep
into other days. A glacialness set in, and life kept pace
with the dried fruit in the jar. Brushed steel gave back
our pissed-off bits, our doubled selves so drained of disguise
we forgot where it was we were hoping to go, holed up
all summer in a corner so dark you’d half expect bison
chalked on a cave-face every time we cadged a light.
It was the kind of place where morning fell for everyone
but harder for some, where bad decisions were lived
counter-clockwise, and endlessly refitted to finish up flush,
where afternoons were a gradual squander of sobriety,
shot glasses lamped with whisky on cue and empties
were the crags of a quandary drunkenness clung to.
Tables where, outside the shrieking reach of the talkers,
can’t-sleeps stayed and night-shifters cooled heels
attended by soul-tools: cellphone, lighter, cigarette.
Nights of middle-aged men enduring middle-aged men
in their cups, buying rounds, half-cusped on high stools.
Sun-up found a few run aground, upshouldered hulls,
while our own lives were an endless keel-scrape where
the pluperfect errand was the errand always deferred.
A kind of time travel, I guess. We sat back and watched
the future screen its clichés of us: those besuited
and briefcased, with their died-and-gone-to-heaven whistle
when handed a pint; those done-to-a-turn divorcees
in duffle coat and boots (wine-sipping casualties of the wife wars);
those who, smashed, stand too suddenly slewing into you,
and those who, if you join, you join uninvited.