Here I am taking up space for good people in a good café.

I have a window seat in Berlin’s Shakespeare and Company
at a long wooden table for other good people with good manners.

My mint tea is complimentary. It is a good mint tea with three leaves floating
in a large white mug with enough hot water to drown a small songbird.
At least one sprig has sunk to the bottom.

I spent €28.90 on two books, one of which, alphabet,
I hoped to read at leisure, glancing up occasionally
to watch walkers in the wet street, a yellow tram glide by.
I was feeling good. The Danish poet, Inger Christensen is dead.
Her biography says she had a formidable intellect, fluent in four languages.

When Christensen won a laurel wreath for a prestigious literary prize,
she used the leaves in soups and stews. I watch the mint leaves steeping.
They tell nothing about how good I am, but permit me to sit
a while longer as the tea gradually darkens to khaki.
I am taking up space that a good person with a fine bagel might occupy
more deservedly because this is “a café not a coworking space.”
I am not ordering and consuming. I do not want a fine bagel.
I did not plan to sit for hours.

Am I a good person with good manners? I am on page 16.
“errors exist, instrumental, systemic,
random; remote control exists, and birds;”
Two pigeons that were pecking near the tram lines have disappeared.
I flip back to the first poem.
“apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist”
Christensen’s poems use a system combining the alphabet
with Fibonacci’s numeric sequence. I am reaching the limit
of balancing bad manners with feeling brazen enough to read, write and sip.
A woman with the number 16 on a stick is wating for a space.
No doubt she has ordered a fine bagel. My mint tea is stewed.
Mint tea exists, books exist. My green beanie exists. Space exists.
The woman waiting to eat her bagel at a window seat exists, good people exist.