<\/p>\n
Paul Askew<\/strong> lives in Oxford, where he regularly performs his poetry. He curates the written content of Ferment<\/em>, a lit\/art zine, and was recently appointed the title of “Sex Symbol of the Oxford Poetry Scene.” By himself, admittedly, but hey, no-one’s challenged him yet. The Time I Tried to Work in a Caf\u00e9 The Catastrophe Caf\u00e9. That was the caf\u00e9 I worked in for a few months. The broken sign bore the tagline: \u201cEmbrace your mistakes.\u201d The owner was called Jane and was as accident prone as they come. You never saw her without some sort of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3669"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3671,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3669\/revisions\/3671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe Time I Tried to Work in a Caf\u00e9
\n<\/strong>
\nThe Catastrophe Caf\u00e9.
\nThat was the caf\u00e9 I worked in for a few months.
\nThe broken sign bore the tagline:
\n\u201cEmbrace your mistakes.\u201d
\nThe owner was called Jane
\nand was as accident prone as they come.
\nYou never saw her without
\nsome sort of cast, sling or plaster
\nshowing off her latest mishap.
\nThe walls were decorated
\nwith photographs of disasters,
\nall the chairs and tables wobbled,
\nevery mug, cup and plate was cracked,
\nevery menu gave you paper cuts.
\nThe kitchen looked like
\nsome sort of bomb site,
\na constant mess of dirty dishes,
\nwell-past-the-sell-by-date food
\nalways spilling out of left open fridges.
\nShe\u2019d keep wild animals in the office.
\nThey frequently disordered and destroyed everything,
\nand she would dance around in the debris
\nlaughing with arms swinging.
\nI once asked her,
\n\u201cHow on Earth do you put up with this?\u201d
\n\u201cI adore chaos.
\nI want chaos to be mine.
\nI want to take it into my arms,
\nkiss its lips,
\nmake it blush,
\nmake it squirm and twitch,
\nI want to make chaos my bitch.
\nI don\u2019t see why I should be afraid of it.\u201d
\nThe caf\u00e9 became a trendy hangout
\nas Jane\u2019s carefree attitude
\nwas seen as being \u201cAgainst the system,\u201d
\nwhich was totally missing the point, of course,
\nbut we were happy for the business.
\nI once heard her utter the words,
\n\u201cOh fuck.\u201d
\nI hadn\u2019t thought this was something
\nshe was capable of thinking,
\nbut there they were, those words,
\ntemporarily tattooing a worried look on her
\nas an error with an order
\n(something that happened frequently)
\nresulted in a customer falling
\ninto anaphylactic shock.
\nThat\u2019s when it got too much for me
\nand a couple of days later
\nI handed in my resignation.
\nShe responded with frustration:
\n\u201cYou\u2019ll look back on this experience
\none day and see what I\u2019ve done for you.
\nI detest everyone\u2019s quest for perfection.
\nPeople need to celebrate things going wrong,
\nit\u2019s those moments that make us who we are.
\nInstead we let ourselves be terrified,
\nnever realising that perfection is boring.
\nI\u2019ve seen perfection. It\u2019s hollow and so fragile
\nyou become too scared to even move.
\nThat is not a life. Life isn\u2019t museum pieces,
\nit\u2019s organic and complex and sometimes a little dirty.\u201d
\n\u201cI\u2019m not asking for perfection,
\nI just don\u2019t think I can handle this!\u201d
\n\u201cOf course you can\u2019t! I can\u2019t! No-one can!
\nThat\u2019s the truth of it! That\u2019s why we do it!\u201d
\n(I still haven\u2019t been able to work out
\nwhat she meant by those final lines.
\nWas she crying for help
\nor trying to make me realise
\nI can\u2019t control what happens in life?)
\n <\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"