Bad Coffee

Grim Coffee

Ah, he thinks, the glory of sitting around the apartment with a cup of lukewarm coffee, reading contrasting views on the relative worth of Ezra Pound and fascist insults. He grits his teeth, choking
on the brackish aftertaste of the java he tries to sip; tepid now, it's color a dead blackness, foul to the taste on the tip of the abused tongue because the pot was left on the heater for two unattended hours.

Just the way he liked it.

He couldn't read Pound at all, never could, although he might admit to himself that he hardly tried in all the years he thought of himself as a poet and a taste maker. The politics were one thing, and all the
revisionist cant about him being a misguided, deluded romantic with no mind for political thinking does not absolve him of the fact that he endorsed fascism as a preferred method of restoring a population's enthusiasm for wholeness. Doubtless Pound was thinking of coming with a society, a culture that would preserve the rights of the artist to chase avant gard projects, but more than that he desired to have the artist in charge of making public policy. Dangerous stuff, he thought.

Dangerous because just he could politicize and exaggerate and otherwise enthuse that cold, brackish coffee is the living end so far as caffeine consumption goes, so could the poet , the artist, the posing dilettante espouse grievous nonsense and make their machinations seem so, so attractive and worth investing every resource in. World War 2 ought to have settled that notion.

Or maybe it doesn't. Suddenly a car horn blasts from the driveway and the coffee tastes like cold crap
in a cup. He grimaces, a tight, downturned frown. His wife kisses him with this foul taste in his mouth.

What was he and the world thinking?