The Restaurant Of Kings

A sardonic observation of powerful men dining with their wives, where the ritual of ordering wine briefly reveals — in one second of shyness — the survivor, the killer, or the dealer beneath the outward grace.

The poem watches powerful men with the precision of a detective — black eyes, skirts and tables as a chorus they will not mention, the outward glance of grace that sings of the survivor, the killer, the dealer. The entire poem hinges on the word 'shy': these men, who no one ever knew, become shy for exactly one second before the observation. That single second of vulnerability is the only crack in the performance, and the poem catches it like a photograph.