Locally Owned Coffee Shop

Bored with the couch
and the desktop,
bored with this particular
slant of light
this particular
winter morning,
I decide to work today
from the locally owned
coffeehouse.

This morning,
reassuringly,
there is obscure
electronic
music
in the air here.
I don’t know dubstep
from dimbulb,
but I do know  

this means
I won’t need to
think past something
I will be compelled to analyze,
like a folk song’s picking pattern
or a well turned lyric,
just to get work done.

Instead
there’s a completely reasonable
amount of squealing and skronking
and screwy rhythms,  
stuff I don’t care enough about
to dissect and be distracted by.

Hustle myself to a table
past two poets,
five bloggers, a rare G+
user of undetermined utility,
and one old cat
surfing for info on bedbugs.

As is the tribe’s custom,
the badge of the white Apple
glows everywhere.

I crack open the laptop
and begin —
a perfunctory spreadsheet
for my perfunctory consulting business,
a half-done poem,
a training manual in progress —
all on the screen at once.

I plunge in
to all of it at once
(so really, I plunge all the way
into nothing at all)

but not before noting
(internally of course, 
as none of the staff here
will care)

how much I love my locally owned coffee shop
and its dedication to not being
a pleasant place to get work done.
It’s good for my work ethic.
It’s good for training my focus.
It’s good for not distracting me
with eclectic atmosphere
or customers:  here there are
nothing but the semi-employed 
hoping the furious typing and surfing
gets them somewhere
else.

It’s almost the same 
as having an actual office
to go to once again.