Poetry: Selections from Leigh Doughty

The Waitress

 

Big businessmen with bland faces

talk earnestly about KPIs, 

reverently, like bible

thumping lunatics

would talk of scriptures.

 

While the big businessmen

with bland faces talked over numbers,

a waitress appeared, 

hair eschew, apron tied tightly,

whos salary sadly earned monthly

less, much less than

the cost of the 

big businessmen’s suits.

 

They would tell her how to 

make their eggs and their steak.

She would keenly listen 

to the bland men

in their big business suits

in the slightest hope 

that maybe if just

a few planets would align 

then the proverbial

pennies of 

big businessmen would 

finally begin

to trickle down.

The nature of man

 

the man who sees himself 

in the ditch.

filthy, desolate, empty.

a perpetual chasm of destruction. 

the source of life's tears.

roaming then writhing

despairing deeply at

his horrendous nature.

Alternative ways we say depression

 

1. silent despair

2. i’m just tired

3. exceptional apathy

4. a bit blue

5. continuously tormented 

6. black dog

7. complete darkness 

8. a hungry abyss, too apathetic to eat

9. drowning without swimming

10. fine

11. like the deepest form of isolation

12. pretty great today

13. a boulder the my chest

14. being home without a home

15. exhausted to the bones

Leigh Doughty is a writer and a language tutor based in Saigon, Vietnam. His previously published work is in the VNexpress, the Nuthatch, and the Subliminal Surgery.