Tapwater Coffee
by Diane Hamill Metzger

They took away our coffee pots;
You know the type:
Big forty-cup, with chrome,
Black plastic spigot and feet;
The kind you’d never use at home.
They said a weapon
Potentially lurked there,
Were it heaved or water thrown.
Now in the land of synthetic dreams,
Of cup-a-soup and instant tea,
Another compromise
Slips in to burden me.
I may suck the caffeine
Of paper packets and sleepless nights
And write endless narratives
Of wasted years and trampled rights,
But, try as I may, as I burn midnight oil,
And heat up my verses and curse my toil,
My thirst is room temperature —
My water won’t boil.
Ah, what emotional masturbation
Brews in the grounds of this pleasure dome;
Drinking tapwater coffee.
And thinking of home.

Diane Hamill Metzger has been serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania and Delaware state prisons since 1975. She is a widely published creative writer.