"Neither heaven nor earth will be at peace if
I don't find it on my goddamned desk
before six," snarled Julius Caesar into his cell
To the smell of ubiquitous coffee.
I was blended in line, and could see all:
Caesar's smart sharkskin-grey suit clearly
Some modern beguilement to help him blend, too.
Gone were silks linens and laurels,
I only knew him from the meridians of his face
And the crash of command in his baritone;
I had known that heartfelt stone and all its loss
Grown from titanic achievement. This man
Had scaled Olympuses to clasp his wreaths
And wore them well, though stonewise. Then,
She took my shriveled paper president
Apparently to fund her mascara habit
And I went to wait in the amorphous collective
For those done waiting in line.
From even across the establishment,
Opposite the opulent armchairs,
His muffled business-curses floated with aroma
And I realized the importance of blending.
(One of their machines had broken
Which is why I had time to wonder at all.)
Without a blended beverage, beans and water are
All I'd own: one taste would destroy the other.
I can become the air and sometimes do,
When I am sick from being bean or broth,
And this was how I saw so well
His snakeskin tongue and his eagle's claws
And plights of Gaul that his face told.
All this I saw while blended, so,
He saw me not. If a bean in his coffee,
No doubt he'd grind me to clay
To better insulate his office from the wind.
(It's not that I despise malleability
But that sometimes a gust can be helpful
When waging bloody campaigns.
Also, clay cannot sing.) I sing,
When I can. I wonder what a tactician
Could know of that fragile thing called music
That graces us best when half at-rest.
Though some say that Caesar shook, thus
He may have been mad; he may have had music.
"That's not what concerns me Karen,"
Intoned the Emperor of Rome,
"You don't take responsibility when you screw up. Yesterday--"
But I didn't hear about that because
My blended beverage was ready. So out
Into the fresh of air with my cup of cardboard,
I snuck a farewell glance through the glass
At that gracious lionskin monarch
Unblended in the coffee shop.
It seems his damning sin was zeal
And possession of a mighty stature --
And deafness to Calpurnia's fear.
Her ugly dreams I carry with me now
And hope I passed none stealthier than I,
Perhaps some well-cloaked Cassius
Or Brutus lost in hidden bravado waiting
To penetrate Caesar in the parking lot.