Poetic License

The announcement came as soon as I got to work yesterday.

Today is haiku day! Jonathan, one of the cooks, said. We're writing haikus about each other.

Haikus do not make for a typical Tuesday at the pizza mines. But I was game.

Julia had already gotten the poetic ball rolling with an ode to Jonathan and his pizza-making prowess:

heart shaped pizza pie
white cloud of flour and smoke
you control the flame

Service was off to a slow enough start that between mixing drinks and opening bottles of wine, I had time to jot down a few lines on the back of an old menu. My first attempt was for Julia, who had recently undergone Lasik eye surgery:

Look into my eyes.
Hindsight is twenty twenty,
and now so are you.

I eked out a few for Danny, Chris, and Jonathan, using the floor staff as my messengers, shuttling scraps of paper from the bar to the kitchen. Those haikus were just as bad as the one for Julia, so I won't make you suffer through any more than necessary.

Soon, the servers were delivering poems to me from the kitchen.

Julia's came first:

coppa, pancetta,
the slicer softly whispers
sopressata, please

On a c-fold, Jonathan wrote one about my baking compulsion:

She bakes all the time
for us. We love it so much.
Butter. Flour. Love.

Chris's haiku was part nod to/order for one of the kitchen's preferred mid-shift refreshments:

Mix, muddle & shake
Do you use maraschinos?
Four cherry Cokes please

It was followed a few moments later by this one:

No, seriously.
Thirst quenching is required
Four cherry Cokes please

Alright, alright. I can take a hint.

So I muddled some cherries with some cherry syrup and added some Coke and sent those drinks off to the kitchen with a final haiku. Unfortunately,

I don't remember
what I wrote, but I know I
did write "Bottoms up!"

Stay tuned for Sonnet Sundays.

Get a Room. Please.

Dear Bar 8 and 9,

If you ever manage to extract your tongues out of each other's ears, maybe you can then explain to me your ease at publicly sharing your moments of emotional and physical intimacy. I mean, you're in a restaurant, for Pete's sake. And I, your humble bartender, am trapped behind the bar, where I can do my best to avert my eyes, but really can only get so far away from you and your nuzzling, groping, and goofy gazes.

Love, or lust, or hormonal surges-- whatever they are, they're all a part of being human. And they can be kinda nice. I get that. And more power to ya! But holy schmo. Wouldn't you rather play out your mating ritual at home? Or at least in a car parked in an alley-- where no one has to watch you?

Think of how much more you'd be able to accomplish if you were actually able to, say, take your clothes off and not just feel each other up, à la junior high school. (I will thank you for actually being able to draw that line.) Given how free and open you are in public, what with all that tongue wrestling, I can only imagine how much more fun you could have in the privacy of your own home.

Well, I can imagine, but I really don't want to. I've seen plenty already.

I'm sorry that I didn't check in to ask you how your pizza was and that I didn't keep your water glasses filled; sometimes the best service is leaving people alone, especially if when it means not interrupting their foreplay. And if there's one thing I'm committed to doing as your bartender it's not interrupting your foreplay.

But I hope the rest of your night went as well as it seemed to be going-- our pizza makes for good carbo-loading!

Sincerely,

Your Bartender/Most Unwilling Voyeur