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.