If my emotions were a place,
It’d be a restaurant kitchen…
A busy pseudo-bistro galley,
Lorded over by a Bourdain-like sous chef,
With Mexican line cooks, doing coke,
And cursing in Espanol,
While servers come and go,
Screaming the escargot is 86’d,
And the useless manager
Is trying to make himself useful
By expediting food but fucking it up.
With a little squeeze of lemon,
The controlled chaos
Is best represented by blood on a bev nap,
A surly bartender begging for more mayo,
Aprons dragging in the soup,
Everyone forgetting the dressing on the side,
And me falling in love
With the sun-dressed hostess.
My heart is the back of the house,
Where the Haitian dishwasher
Smokes spliffs without a care in the world,
An ageless, grease-covered radio
Plays punk rock perpetually,
The food runner is always late,
Everyone is in the weeds,
Everything is on the fly,
And last call is a state of mind.
The shift meal is beans on toast,
Each Relationship remind me of high school,
Negligible yet nuanced, even love is loud,
Like dishes breaking and 4 steaks were ordered at table 20,
And 3 more are ordered at table 11,
That means 7 steaks all day,
So pass the pepper, take my brunch shift,
and put me out of my misery.