This was written at a diner in Ann Arbor on Main Street. It was sometime after 9/11, sometime after my friends' capricious outrage and desire to enlist in the Marines. We calmed down quickly for being so outraged. We were patriotic -- and, had it come to it, I nearly know we'd have defended our nation alongside those braver than we who are resolutely defending us now -- but we were also happy and full of promises overflowed from an earlier generation fed promises by the 1980s and Reagan and a century of eventual prosperity built on a belief of entitlement, inevitability and war.
American Flag eggs—scrambled
Lightly over lugubrious sips
Of coffee,
Never Forgetting.
Refreshed, reborn with the daybreak:
A taste for these eggs and bacon,
and a vigilant appreciation,
jammed and bustled voluntarily,
as close as comfortable strangers can be,
in this harmonious alive café.
Harmonious and awesome order,
an heirloom, protected and loved
with unquestioning, unwavering sacrifice—
a determined cold eye set above
a protruding tense jaw says fervidly,
to my hated courageous enemy,
Your sacred defiance I admire,
But there is one woman at the table,
and a handful of poorly dressed men,
all gladly suffering the daybreak and
a serious breakfast beneath scrolling
lights of numbers, stories, and other
vain symbols across—
And I love them.