Burn Down The Coffee Shops

Take your coffee shops, your latte sets and your plastic macaroons,

Your mother’s group and your corporate meeting, the one off fleeting.

Your dry toasties and your muffins, your lunch-time offers and all those

Lovers cheating, aluminium insignificant seating.

Your so-called loyal, coffee-cafe sluts who want it, not too hot,

But warm? No warm is not enough and too much froth, they become wroth

And find their way to another lane. Then another coffee shop

Draws them in like a light draws the moth, like water to a dish-cloth.

Let us burn down the coffee shops and with fury break all the cups,

Dismantle their anti-social setting, the caffeine starved fretting.

Take away the cheap flower and vase and ugly wall mounted prints.

Throw out the smug Baristas sweating and office runner’s getting

Morning beverages on order for the young girls to carry

For other office girls, the boss, the busy road they have to cross.

Lock out all the public transport public, who buy their plastic cups,

Careless of the cost and loss, the environmental albatross.

Where’s your committed local who enters the door with lust and love?

Where’s your wine and your pint glasses and where’s your high stools for arses?

Where’s the reserved corner bar stool for the long lost and dead patron?

Where’s your foot rest brasses and your winter night poetry classes?

You sit, holding onto city corners in little glass boxes

Your little glass fronted boutique, you are now nothing so unique.

Fuck you and your loyalty card and your three different sizes

Fuck all the tea drinkers too with voices meek and China antique.

Mine is the corner house, the local, the tiled walls and frosted glass

Mine is for the veranda, the lounge, the bar, the spot for the car

To stay a while too long, if I linger at night for the lock-in

And to sing with a girl, and her guitar, her entire repertoire

Mine is for the memory of small country pubs, cities and towns

And on corners where venues so great and grand, where you drink and stand

And a place where the people come and you know them by face or name

And if not, with kindness they each understand and reach for your hand.