Saturday's Poem: People Who Eat in Coffee Shops

Today's poem by Edward Field (who was born in New York in 1924) is delightfully irreverent, irrelevant to anything I've posted lately, and a good excuse to use the picture of that cool Manhattan coffee shop sign.

I’ve had a discouraging, who-gives-a-damn week and I wish I had a chocolate egg cream.

Maybe I’ll go to bed without flossing tonight.

PEOPLE WHO EAT IN COFFEE SHOPS by Edward Field

People who eat in coffee shops
are not worried about nutrition.
They order the toasted cheese sandwiches blithely,
followed by chocolate egg creams and plaster of paris
wedges of lemon meringue pie.
They don't have parental, dental, or medical figures hovering
full of warnings, or whip out dental floss immediately.
They can live in furnished rooms and whenever they want
go out and eat glazed donuts along with innumerable coffees,
dousing their cigarettes in sloppy saucers.

"People Who Eat in Coffee Shops" by Edward Field, from Counting Myself Lucky: Selected Poems 1963-1992. © Black Sparrow Press, 1992

Speaking of coffee shops, you might also like this post about a long ago Long Island diner.