SYNESTHESIA

coffee is no longer where it comes from, but how

when the ends are increasingly assumed

ethics you can taste, politics on the tip of your tongue

the roof of the mouth is still a roof like ketchup was a vegetable

food and shelter -- the irreducible minimum – and from this seed

a stadium, the welfare state, with its own lip services paid for

by Postwar Economic Growth, the team that keeps on winning

the United States the Globetrotters, the Generals Everyone Else

not a cosmos but a line ascending, the straighter the better

like those Apollo rockets and their ferocious lift-offs

not The Economy we were watching but a rehearsal

of that which has become a tendency to associate rockets

with economies, not the opposite of bombs dropped

concurrently on Hanoi, Nam Dinh and Viet Tri

but the appearance of an opposite

because what was sent to the moon

and what fell on North Vietnam

was the coffee mom bought at the supermarket

the loss-leader bananas that lured her there

coffee still comes from the same places

but it is the treatment of its pickers

that gives it its taste