
Almost all of the poetry I have been constructing the last 20+ years has been collage poetry meaning that I gather textual materials here and there on line by a variety of means and then arrange into poems. The following poem I actually wrote myself. I have been reading some Charles Bukowski poetry who throws down some poetry about almost anything which I like. He just sits down and starts typing stuff about birds on the telephone line or the guys building a house down the street, etc.
Actually, this poem is still a collage poem because the original story I told in my journal as prose but then thought it might be interesting to tighten it up and make a poem out of it by removing any text that wasn’t critical like I would typically do with other material. Then I came up with a cleaver title.
The Old Woman and the Tea
Sunday, December 10, 2023
An old woman
taking care of our drinks
at the Vietnamese restaurant.
I ordered water with ice.
Nisa ordered a cup of hot water with lemon.
Rosalia ordered water with only a small amount of ice.
Then the old woman
brought Nisa’s hot water with lemon,
Rosalia’s water with not much ice.
But for me, for some reason,
she brought a large glass of tea with ice.
Why did she do that?
I have no idea.
I didn’t say anything about it.
She acted like that was what I ordered.
Tea and water don’t sound anything alike.
We joked at the table about why
she might have brought me a glass of tea.
Rosalia thought that maybe she decided
that I needed some tea instead of water.
Who knows.
Anyway, I drank the tea
but since I don’t really drink tea,
I was not sure what kind of tea it was
Rosalia tasted it and said it was jasmine tea.
OK whatever.
It was wet and that was the main thing.
TAKE A MOMENT: Look around the place you are sitting in right now.