ME: (Tries to work)

MY BRAIN: TS Eliot, you old bastard.

ME: ?

MY BRAIN: Measuring your life out in coffee spoons? How posh. How first world. I am measuring out my life in plastic swizzle sticks from McDonald’s and you’re bitching about spoons.

ME: Hello?

MY BRAIN: HOW ABOUT YOU RAM THOSE SPOONS, PRUFROCK.

ME: I am sensing some anger here.

MY BRAIN: In the room the women come and go, talking of Family Guy episodes.

ME: Not quite how the line goes, I think.

MY BRAIN: Guy lived in an oil painting and all he can do is complain. Spoons. I would love to measure out my life in spoons. Instead I start measuring it out in swizzlers and get it all over the table. I have to scoop my life up off the floor using the five second rule.

ME: Disturbingly literal, yet almost impossible to visualize.

MY BRAIN: My life has floor cooties all over it.

ME: You could get a spoon.

MY BRAIN: But I need spoons plural.

ME: You could go to Starbucks. They have spoons. And sugar and things.

MY BRAIN:

Would it have been worth while,
To have given them my order with a smile,
To have squeezed my wants into a brief talk
And rattled it off like a caffeine-starved parrot,
To say: “Venti half-caf extra whip
with a shot of peppermint to top it off,”
If the barista, handing me a red-eye,
Should say, “That is not what I heard at all.
That is not it, at all.”

ME: Cool. Do one for Dunkin’ Donuts.

MY BRAIN: No. I heard the mermaids singing, each to each, and they were doing an aria called “Knock it off with the pastries.”

ME: Sounds like you’re stuck with the swizzlers for now.

MY BRAIN: When I do get around to disturbing the universe I’ll poke it with a sharpened coffee stirrer.

ME: That’ll learn it.

TS Eliot’s Love-Song is slightly different.