He’s recalling his handy plastic cup
marked Soda Central,
a bevy of stamped
22 oz. sentries
neatly lined up
as curled gatekeepers among artwork swamped
over the cylinder like curved guitar
strings and Peter Max-style loopings and dots
all in butterscotch-color ink. Dark tar
of tobacco juice would slog from mouth’s slot
down the cup’s length, stain its walls, form a sludge
pool at its base. It’s hard to sense now how
nicotine soothed him, link it to light nudge
of morphine from his epidural, slow
like a dying battery; how lumped chaws
could cost him his sacred tongue and left jaw.
Roger Armbrust
May 13, 2012
