Your Diner Awaits
Neon sign pulsing like a vein,
a beacon for the hungry – “Diner” –
okay, so maybe the “r” needs a little nudge
every now and then –
but trucks pull into the parking lot,
a car circles them with care.
Nothing much else happening at two a.m.,
just the deranged stumbling from the bars,
shaking like hanging lanterns
before stumbling into the gutter.
So cheap food, muddy coffee, surly waitress,
grim-faced cook, it is.
Plus six booths,
a counter crammed with bodies,
some stools that spin and some that don’t,
conversation that occasionally touches a wound
but mostly rambles on, guttural and weary.
The bearded bald guy’s been driving for someone
named Hopkins for going on thirty years.
The tattooed Slav only ever sees his wife on weekends.
The cook has a prison record.
He’s reformed enough to hold down a lousy job.
And that waitress makes in tips
what she loses in flesh under the eyes.
Diner’s not a cross-section of anything.
It’s just people who are off to the side.
All complaints are the one complaint.
Every night is one just like it.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. Latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert, and Memory Outside The Head are available through Amazon. Work forthcoming in California Quarterly, Seventh Quarry, La Presa and Doubly Mad.
