All-Day Breakfast

June 8 2015

All-day breakfast

comes with a bottomless cup

and a waitress in comfortable shoes.

No wobbly heels

or low-cut dress.

No neutral "server"

drained of sex.

Because breakfast is never

served by men.

But by mothers,

who drag themselves up

when nothing stirs

and morning is murky as dusk.

When the kitchen light

is a yellowish blur,

and the house is at peace

and the time is hers.

When her housecoat was frumpy

and she was bored by the drudgery

but still took care,

no matter how thankless

or undeserved.

A woman's work,

that never seems to be done

or earn what it's worth.

The waitress cracks wise

and the grill men curse,

while the bacon fries

and the toast is burnt.

And the smell of coffee

like she used to perk

perfumes the steamy air.

I hate getting up before noon.

So all-day breakfast

is comfort food,

warming the soul

in a greasy spoon,

feeling like home

in an old-fashioned diner

where the waitress calls me “dear”.

Breakfast served

in the dregs of the night

every day of the year.

I was quickly glancing over a publisher's ad in the book section. One title caught my eye: All-Day Breakfast. Three words that evoke instant comfort! So I ran with it. But as soon as I found myself writing "waitress", I realized that this is no longer the politically correct term. Yet I can't picture an old-fashioned diner or a greasy spoon serving all-day breakfast without also picturing the traditional waitress: maternal, capable, and able to put everyone at ease. And so the poem found its direction. And also allowed me to redeem my political incorrectness, in these 3 lines: A woman's work,/ that never seems to be done/ or earn what it's worth. Phew!!

I suppose this might have gone easier with a rhyming dictionary. But once I got started having fun with "serve", it didn't matter: I suspect I exhausted just about every conceivable rhyme! The art, of course, isn't demonstrating one's ear for language; it's in making the word-choice seem the most natural thing in the world. The last thing you want -- unless you're being ironic, or self-consciously playful -- is to have a word sound shoe-horned in, a sentence contorted for the sake of rhyme. (Although I’m pretty sure I went a little overboard here, and it does sound like showing-off!)