At the diner at 4 a.m.,<\/p>\n
cheesecake and coffee<\/p>\n
the brew so dusty sweet<\/p>\n
and the cake real ricotta.<\/p>\n
At the diner, we’d talk<\/p>\n
after the bars close<\/p>\n
and the beer wore off,<\/p>\n
and eat French fries<\/p>\n
or eggs and put dimes<\/p>\n
in the table top juke box,<\/p>\n
hear our favorite songs<\/p>\n
like Free bird and<\/p>\n
Sympathy for the Devil.<\/p>\n
And we’d splay our<\/p>\n
legs on long, red, vinyl<\/p>\n
seats sometimes cracked,<\/p>\n
our backs against booth<\/p>\n
walls of plastic sheen.<\/p>\n
At the diner, we’d hum<\/p>\n
the songs we heard at the<\/p>\n
bar we just left, our favorite<\/p>\n
local bands playing, while<\/p>\n
we drank Heineken and<\/p>\n
smoked Camel cigarettes,<\/p>\n
out back for a J or two.<\/p>\n
But under the bright lights<\/p>\n
of the diner til quarter to 7 or<\/p>\n
later, we’d laugh sometimes<\/p>\n
spitting our coffee or Pepsi<\/p>\n
at some stupid shit one of us<\/p>\n
said, and everything’s funny<\/p>\n
when you haven’t slept all night.<\/p>\n
At the diner, off the expressway,<\/p>\n
the waitresses know us, and<\/p>\n
bring us our eggs and toast<\/p>\n
the way we like them, sunny<\/p>\n
side up and easy tan and grape<\/p>\n
jelly in the little plastic peel off<\/p>\n
boxes, three or four of them.<\/p>\n
And every Friday and Saturday<\/p>\n
it was the same for us three,<\/p>\n
Deb, Jackie and me, at the diner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At the diner at 4 a.m., cheesecake and coffee the brew so dusty sweet and the cake real ricotta. At the diner, we’d talk after the bars close and the beer wore off, and eat French fries or eggs and put dimes in the table…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marathon-poem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28064"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29944,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28064\/revisions\/29944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}