When unspeakable words boiled
beneath his tongue,
he flattened the chewing gum lumps
spackled to the undersides of our café table.
His hands moved like an avenging flood
forced above ground by some holy,
unbearable pressure in the earth’s dark gut.
While the skies between our ears were stirred
by a gossiping pantheon of coffee steam,
the remnants left by the tongues of men
were pressed low with his sad and steady force,
the desperate act of a repressed god
reduced to vengeance through geology.
As all had become silence and flatness
in earth and ear, his shoulders slumped,
the coffee mugs became lukewarm caldera
in accordance with natural law,
the proper tips were calculated,
and a dead yahweh sloshed in his stomach.
