✒Keurig

A poem for a coffee product compiler

A roach crawled out of our Keurig at work. This made me contemplate the hellish existence of a Keurig machine: a sad degradation of something once delightful, doomed to make tepid coffee at an exhaustive rate, forever, for nothing.

I was teaching Anglo-Saxon poetry at the time, which is elegiac—a word from which we derive “eulogy” and one that means “written in mourning for a degraded Earth.” Gods become giants become heroes become men, or else gods die at Ragnarok and are born again, either way, ancient elegiac poets see us on the downward slope of history rather than on an arch that bends toward justice.

I find it pretty ironic that the Anglo-Saxons wrote their elegies about kings and warriors while I write mine about ubiquitous coffee machine brands with dubious ecological impact.

It would seem elegiac poetry isn’t what it once was.

Keurig 

I slip a paper cup into your alcove 
open, close your visor 
and find your blinking button 
with my thumb. 

You cry printer sounds,
corporate groans, 
then burp a trickle-piss 
of light brown fluid. 

Towards the end, your stream deflates and 
you squeeze out a string of little farts-- 
like gasps (or sobs). 

And then you hum another round  
of stagnant, sterile water
into your chamber,
fit for another set of thankless hands.

Oh measuring giver!
Mother to a mass of tongues and lips!
Beverage bureaucrat!
Caffeine calculator! Dopamine drip!

Do you, like me, dream ancestral dreams?

A steel stove atop a range fire, 
your sacred black incense
poured to fuel a pair of freezing palms 
folded as in prayer 
about some warm copper cup? 

---

Thanks to my friend Ivy for proofreading this one and providing some beautiful insight: “Editing a poem is like sharpening words into a fine point. You sharpen them again and again until they can pierce someone. In sharpening, you take away, you do not add.” I’ve sharpened this one a lot, and I think it’s still pretty dull, and I’m trying to be OK with that.

Thanks to this Mo1229 for the image.