In my small town supermarket
they have a soup bar.
It's self-serve
and they allow free samples.
But,
Free sample
means samples
as in before you buy soup
so you can try a little sip
to see if you like
the clam chowder,
beef and barley which has too much green pepper,
or squash bisque
before you fill the paper cup
or the larger one
with hot
delicious
soup.

It doesn't mean
"free soup"
to eat while walking
through the store
and not buying any soup
after the sample is gone
and then
as if to add insult
to injury,
leave the empty ramekin
with your sample tailings
on a random shelf,
sometimes even with a little plastic spoon
and a used napkin,
tucked behind a roll of paper towels
or toilet paper
or catfood
on your way out of the store
to stand in the parking lot
and complain to other petty soup thieves
about how "some people"
get stuff
for
free.

Here by the Beat Hotel near
the St Michel in a cafe with wine
I feel the hum turn to sizzle and
sparkle and overfill into my eyes
too much till they are brimming with
hope that could spill onto the table
and my heart is swelling with a
optimism and I feel it spilling
over I worry I will laugh crazy
for no reason but to release
all the glowing light inside which
is feeling far too obvious for everyone
they will think I am drunk but I have only had a sip but this
conversation is several glasses of something of energy of
fermented anger and worries
and anxieties about the world

turned into wine and we
sip the sentences we sip the
sentences and eyes clink glances
in holistic belief and hope it
is so much but you
say we are free we
are freer than this ramekin
which once held peanuts which
we nibbled between drink
and thought and you say you
can’t believe you are talking of
Sartre here and it is cliché
but the words
ripple like a song we know we
forget but when it plays
we forget we forgot and always
know we need to hear it again
we wish we could record the
feeling the sights the words the
way you say the words so
that we are filled with childlike
possibility when life weighs us
to stare at our feet.

I am tired of missing you,
the exercise of the distance.
Like a cat,
returning to it's bowl
no more than five minutes after emptying it,
you are a temporary figure now,
that cannot claim object permanence.

That someday,
poured into a ramekin
like honey and soap,
is numbed by the relentless and
staggered steps
of the hour.

Lift your eyes up, to the horizon
where the plane flattens
into a thin line
and the future lays blue
and final.