Prismatics at the Bluebird Cafe

There's a fat guy staring at a box of stamps
in the southeast corner of this tiny piece of paradise
whose walls are hung with posters of other people
staring at the boxed stamps too
He left right after I began writing this
Is it okay for me to say the word fat?
or is it shaming another person? an innocent person
of gathering weight and unknown substance

My mother wants to know as she was once fat too
as am I and I don't want to shame anyone
or to be cruel even in my thoughts
I don't want to appear on Post Office walls
here or in Dallas or in New York City
Especially in New York City
The people are so touchy there
and derive a certain egotistic pleasure

in living in a land paid for in $24 worth of glass
by Dutch men who harvested the organs of anemones
and sold them to the Indians in exchange for wagon loads
of blood and bone, of coagulation and copulation
of hair matted with the torn flesh
of feeding jackals and two large teeth with
dark cavities staring up forlornly
​
from the middle of a blue plastic dish
sitting on a red formica counter top and
mixed with pomegranate seeds and two
grisly earlobes taken from a homeless settler
sitting in a huge furrow, a furrow he himself had made
with rusty plow hanging from an overlarge 
Swiss Army knife hung from a six inch belt
sporting a yellow plastic  happy face

glued on as its solitary buckle and the furrow sitting
stranger secretly smirked and smiled insidiously 
every time he sat in traffic on the outside of Topeka
and fingered the buckle while thinking of Sally
Sally in the alley, Sally my only pally
the waitress at the Bluebird who had stuck
her thumb in his coffee that very morning
as a friend of his wife saw and reported the incident

to his pregnant Honey Bunny and the whole bunch
of other snickering snot nose instigators
sitting in silent shadows not knowing what else to do
but knowing that Honey had reached her tipping point
six months before because of his unceasing demand
for fellatio, at which point he forgot his mother's wishes
and got Honey all pregnant and agitated and shit
over the simple thumb in the simple coffee

The finger in the Coffee incident had so quickly spread
through the Sunless Valley of the Sunken Ships so fast in fact 
that the drunken bums of Denver who lived lost lonely lives
of languid leisure of life time stretching loneliness in
hidden tunnels carved beneath the snow covered Rockies
had heard of the tale and told it over and over, over and over
to the stragglers shapeless and unformed and uninformed
the bums whispered to the night winds in their nightmares

to their night sweats and their night stained underwear.
did you hear the story? they mumbled
What's that the wind whistled back as it made its way
Southward She tested the waters don't you know
Not the thumb the birds repeated the missus was bound
to find out the winds would hiss she was bound to know
The birds rolled their eyes in silence and looked back
over their shoulders toward the place the winds had came

And the knowledge of the plastic coated belt buckle
smirkingly fingered in the gridlock formed in
the eyes of the Deans of Columbia and made the rounds
so quickly that the New York Times, that faded lady, the old grande dame
who sold herself on street corners for pennies and dimes
who lost her virginity in a game of Russian Roulette
on the upper balcony of a building close to the Gemini
printed the news of the coffee thumb tryst on the last pages

next to arrivals and departures as the chattering chipmunks
and the slithering snakes did their very best to tear
apart the phonics and the hidden meanings and rewrote
the whole story in baby talk and printed it in blue ink
on the back of a playing card and then tore it into pieces
which were hidden in the trash cans of a subway tunnel
and afterwards swore themselves to secrecy as the
Midwest remains suspicious to this day as they have

every day since the Pope gave in to the Kings and
the Kings began their divine mission of fucking up
everything they come in contact with Midas like
without the gold and growing tired of all the noise
and the hubbub of the fray and afraid of the bitter cut
of beckoning blades and gave it over to us, the people
who in our infinite wisdom tossed it into the gutter
while here I sit staring at the moon behind a neon bluebird

wondering if I can use the word fat in a sentence