Coffee House

Cups fill to the brim with music

rich and warm, poems
brown and frothy

Guitars burst with pages from life, real and hard

Masked thinly by tune and rhythm.

We are neighbors who agree to be strangers,

To seek kind anonymity for

memories too harsh to bear

dreams too fragile to speak aloud.

Performer or audience, to watch or to do

Here, it’s all the same.

To slow down

for an evening separate from a frenzied world

We take a breath of another life.

We take away bits of each other;

See in others bits of ourselves.

We have stolen a moment of sacred sharing

Among strangers who are really neighbors.

©2011 Donna Jo Wallace.