Coffee house discourses*

I
The dilemma of Mr. Smith of sunset valley

Fiery dawn, capricious dawn, let down dawn
What do I do with her?
What do I do about her?
Maybe I shall let her set out
Maybe I shall let her dawn on me.


II
At the shores of poetry

Yeats*, Joyce*, Plath*
Now trickling, now flowing, now flooding
This river runs deep, runs strong, runs fast along
Outpourings of Shakespearean* iambic pentameter to drown me,
These they flood into the river, to break down my dam of illiteracy.

III
Insomnia

At the coffee house,
Time escapes my watch,
Like sleep escapes my coffee drowned eyes

IV
The Caribbean express

On and on he goes,
Like the chook chook train
Trainloads of words, never broken, never derailed

Dickson E Wasake
28 June 2007
2.36 am

*The Coffee house discourses are written following what has now become a routine where together with Obie and Dawn (two of Nassau’s greatest artists) we often sit at Starbucks coffee(Crystal Palace Hotel, Nassau) on Wednesday night, and sail on the long winding rivers of literature until we reach the delta of time’s end and then we split off, to our homes, for a while.

*James Joyce, Irish writer and author of Ulysses, the modern library considers it the best English language novel of the 20th Century
*William Butler Yeats, Irish poet and won nobel prize for literature(1923)
*Sylvia Plath, American poet credited with advancing confessional poetry
*William Shakespeare, English poet wrote some of his sonnets in iambic pentameter a form of writing(predominantly neoclassical and renaissance) with rhythmic syllables that go from a stressed to an unstressed part.