JITTERY

Nancy takes me to a coffee shop called "Jitters"
which is, I'm thinking, like naming a bar "Drunk":
what you get when you get too much of what it is

they've got to give you - though that's just me
of course, going off. I'm feeling kind of drunk
on talk and too much coffee and Nancy's laughing

easy like she maybe thinks: *okay*. Me, I mean,
though I'm reading into things of course -
talk, laughter - speed-reading into things

what with all the coffee and little sleep
I'm running on of late. Things, their course,
have not been great though I'm feeling not

unhappy to be alive and not asleep and here
with Nancy blabbing out my life like some black
and white Karl Malden movie tough guy grateful

to finally confess and yes I'll obsess on
splitting that infinitive since Nancy knows
syntax ("*syn*-, together + *tassein*, to arrange");

Nancy knows yoga, Neruda, dogs, and yes
to the body's thoughtless crush on the world and
her smile flies open like a sun-flushed dove

and right, I know I talk too much and think
too much about what I'm thinking and not
enough about what I say, and simmer too long

in the crock of myself, which is right where I
get when I get this way and want to say
shut up, Simmerman, just shut up. . . .

Nancy takes me to a coffee shop.


Jim Simmerman


For some reason today I want to mete and dole laws unto a savage race. Maybe I should just cut back on the vending machine coffee. It tastes like it could have been made in Berlin in 1945 before the Allies arrived with actual coffee and they could stop using bark.