A Poem by Lynn Hoffman

the intelligent design cafe

you were probably wondering what happened
to life’s first drafts, the rough sketches, paper models
and little cream cheese sculptures molded on the kitchen table
with a butter knife-you know, the ones with peppercorns for eyes.

you may have had a moment of sadness thinking
of the three-eyed people and the frogs with wheels for legs.
maybe you wondered about the squirrels with glass-clear skin
and rubber teeth and the whiskerless cats with radar.

well step right in you finished product you,
take a walk around the intelligent design cafe.
the place where the first drafts have a draft
and the dead ends sit chatting on their dead ends.

the Designer, it turns out, was a pretty decent guy
and he figured that if you worked for Him
you shouldn’t get laid off. the distinction of extinction?
well, he’d leave that for the evo-devo darwinists.

and that is why this very day, in the intelligent design cafe
the influenza virus is bellied up to your cytoplasm with the virus that
only tells fart jokes and that all the people who believe
in the intelligent design cafe
can somehow breathe the same air as all the ones who don’t.

Lynn Hoffman has been a merchant seaman, teacher, chef and cab driver. This year, he's been Visiting Professor at the Academy of Culinary Arts in Mays Landing and Visiting Professor in Hospitality at Hoa Sen University in Saigon. So far he's published two novels, The Bachelor's Cat and Paula Sherman and the National Rifle Association. He's also written The New Short Course in Wine and The Short Course in Beer. Right now he's working on a second, expanded edition of the beer book. A few years ago, he started writing poetry. 

His poem, The Would-be Lepidopterist has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Other poetry has appeared in Angelic Dynamo, Melusine, gutter eloquence, Off the Coast, Waterways, Abramelin, Referential,The Broad Street Review, Sephyrus and Short, Fast and Deadly. His main influences are Geoffrey Chaucer, William Blake, Billy Collins, Groucho Marx and Ogden Nash. There is a chapbook forthcoming from Thunderclap Press called Boom: Poems for a Certain Generation.