Noon 20151202

Lunch café at work hotel, bustling customers

Executive team members: president, corporate attorney, and me (financial controller)

Divisions of company they are parallel, but separate

Me under the president, two listening to the lawyer

Spiel about his Austrian vacation gallivanting at a Glock factory showroom 

A spec prototype rifle and automatic handguns, motions a cartoonish spray

Tommy-gun sound gyrating bullet dispenser

Talks of World War Two carved out mountain tunnel bunkers for miles

The whole town could fit, vehicles cavernous seclusion to avoid the bombs

Mentions terrorists, the good-to-see gropes and checks exiting the airplane

The did not wear his LSU sweatshirt because someone told him not to look like an American

Says could live there but the socialist taxes seventy-eight percent Clinton bullshit

I am listening eating my manager-meal salad, him grilled shrimp; I describe aloud

Taking trains between countries because the president and his hamburger steak have never been

My recollection of a bus trip from Venlo to Paris

The attorney says take a car, some places off-city you can only get to

Like a valley he recounts to see Hitler’s crow’s nest Kehlsteinhaus in Germany

Obersalzberg in Berchtegaden vowels per Wikipedia not his lips

As he imagines the death rain of any coming to attack perched Fuhrer  

Fox’s News on the café HDTV scrolling Colorado Planned Parenthood gunman

Terrorist Syrian refugees spit from talking-head psycho killer boxes

I mention more likely car-jacking here in New Orleans, people want a reason

I say the cops are understaffed since Katrina”.  Lawyer says, “Bullshit, I am cop; I get memos.”

I say, “There are entire areas of the city underserved and the criminals know the police cannot cover everything.”  He retorts, “No, they have plenty enough.  They’re incompetent fucking niggers.”

I feel a whelp inside, a throb, a visceral egg awakening.

The triad of workplace, customers, team-members from the kitchen staff

The breath of servers who placed our plates before us, my salad consumed, my lips

I abruptly stand, depart “I’ll let yall finish lunch.” 

Elevator back to my office second floor, his seventeenth 

Scene two of them to finish that dangling conversation

The tingle of personal energy put into a common working endeavor

That would allow this to comingle; a welt of failure in my gut

Of when it is a white cheek’s place to speak on race

Of the poet in me consistently saying listen, don’t talk, you don’t know never will

But in those spaces of absolute whiteness where such rants are typically reserved

To speak there, otherwise people of color are capable, powerful, and poignant to speak

But this, this out in the open give-a-fuck who hears

The fear of what it would mean to put him in his place on the basis of some sort of human standard

And that self-preservationist clench to my employment, livelihood

Of how I got it, the doors that have been opened to me and why my entire life

The jolt-bolt up from that chair and all I had to say, the tiny comparative shit-gulp of it all

Like rat feces over bovine quantity and frequency of memories of commentaries

Of my own family members of I will not tolerate this and why’s spoken compared to everyday

On the god-damn street, looks, parking lots, restaurants lunch counter café seating, buses    

Recollections of warnings the president gave me about this man before

How he lives in the country Northshore and owns a tank

A full-grade tank he can drive and the time he injured his hand slammed in the hatch cover

The higher-up meetings of type-A cursing, the posturing court yells

Lingering fog of afternoon discussions of accounting software, budget preparations

Focus time, president would fire him if he could long ago

Hangs on old-school tolerance, people do not change, chainless bulldog slobbery gums

Retribution kind of man that never forgets, an accusation unrelated

Pouring down the elevator shaft like fire-water, the white privilege at that table

Me sipping the glass of tap water Yoshika poured for me the plate Monchel placed

What it feels like to feel a glimmer, an olfactory smell of a taste I will never know

What it tastes like every day to people of color

It tasted like helplessness; knowledge of understanding of is

A swallow of the world embodied in a muted tongue

Allowing a retort in pondering did I create a problem for myself

Instead of laughing in or admonishing the lawyer’s face of how out of line, of staring him down

Knowing the blood heightened in his veins aroused by bullet-talk

With his fake-service badge that makes him thinks he is law enforcement

Of allies and axis, of 2015 digestion, of Ayn Rand’s Atlantis with a Riordan tank engine

Revving the world on whose shoulders, the HDTV still color-streaming in the background