In the morning, while full darkness still holds the sun below the horizon and after I have fed the cats and walked the dog, I am free to take the beans from the cupboard, grabbing the grinder with my free hand, tucking a filter under my chin, and spreading them around the coffee maker with its carafe stained with brown varnish and its housing black around the reservoir, and after dumping the previous day’s solidity of compressed wet grounds in the trash, I can begin to grind the fresh, brittle, airy, Italian roasted beans to a fine grit so that the oils are liberated from the pulp until they almost emulsify the grounds in the bottom of the grinder into something like a cookie, a reddish brown, nearly black cookie that clings together in a disk shape I am tempted to bite into but instead crumble into the filter, heaping well beyond the limit line, while the water, I trickle stingily into the pot to brew a strong, sludgy, brutal coffee that will slap me with welterweight hooks on both cheeks and banish the dark from the sky so my eye will wake at last to the sun which finally peeks up from its lid and blinking says, “Hello.”

Just some goofing with long single sentences. I use them in my fiction and occasionally make poems out of long sentences. The short, choppy sentence generally holds sway as the preferred American form, but you’ll find the long sentences in surprising places such as William Carlos Williams.

Aug 30, 2020 Sharing at Writers Pantry #35 at Poets and Storytellers United. 

Episode 6 of the PoJo Show — a podcast mixing poetry, spoken word, music, and sound — is now up on the Sound Files page and on my YouTube channel. This show’s theme is Shark Week.