A drafty basement. Bitter coffee. 12 steps.
Attendees join four-fingered hands
and bow blue, green, orange, yellow heads,
in surrender and serenity.

[This is the poem.]

If ever cheese were cheese, then surely you.
I’ll never eat another; that much is true.

His faithless cock wants to feel her sigh:
tender, deliberate, slow—
He could never love her like he wants her thighs,
her sleepy bending legs, vulgar phrases she borrows.

Odysseus stood before the food court, flummoxed, bewildered, confused,
bereft of all ideas, no clever scheme could he devise,
None of his considerable craft was of use,
Nothing he knew had prepared him for this, no experience,
Not all of his wanderings in search of his beloved Ithaca had readied him,
he was lost, adrift, as surely as if he had been storm-tossed, alone, on the wine-dark sea.