once you return to your bottle,
make a note of the duration of time
it has been since you were here before.
has it been a jiffy? have there been
lots of spaces of unaccounted for time since
last you saw your bottle? has it perhaps been
only a few minutes or an hour or an afternoon?
did you leave the bottle in a cool and dry place,
like for example in a refrigerator, with the lid screwed
tightly on? did you screw said lid in the very least,
perhaps even askance it might provide some
protection for your fine beverage
from the elements, whatever those
elements might be. and if you come in
toward your bottle, say almost touching your nose
upon the hopefully chilly surface of it, all of these
things depending, and if your nose is not at all pleased
with the chill, it being highly inappropriate with regard
to what befits a beverage such as that which is left of your
own, within the confines of the purportedly, or at least
hopefully, chilly bottle, which you
do or do not press neatly into your face for just the
perfect few seconds of time before you relax your thumb
and fingers upon the cap in order to set about
unscrewing that which keeps it within (you did say
you screwed the lid back on tightly, did you not?),
well,
and when the lid is gone and you’ve depressed the
open end of your fair bottle upon your tongue,
awaiting what can and surely shall be
the perfection of the submission and then the suck
and the swish and then the swallow of
what remains quite an attractive
bit of liquid –
but if, perchance, i might add here, that is,
if what lands upon the tongue
in no ways resembles the memory
of, or the expectation of, based upon the
memory of, all that the beverage could be,
given the dregs of what now is but a dainty
trail left down the middle of the tongue pretty much
right up to the the sluices of the bottom of the throat and the
entryway into the stomach –
well if you don’t feel the fizz you
expected with certainty, then
don’t get pissy with the beverage,
and most certainly not with me,
for the victim and the culprit are gonna be
one in the same, mister! so not a click, nor a tut-tut,
and you might as well just look the other way,
because you can be well assured that the rest of
mine was just as deliciously fizzy when I screwed off
the cap as it was when only 15 minutes ago I
slurped up the remainder,
and with such great delight! oh, and I might as well
take advantage of a moment such as this
to bid you a cool and refreshing good night.
