I Drink My Coffee Black

Yes, coffee, hot and black, the first cup to wake up, the second cup to enjoy, and all the rest to keep me alive and working.

I’m a writer and I drink my coffee black.

I was not always a writer.

I did not always drink my coffee black.

Before becoming a writer, I was a soldier. I once bled in my drill sergeant’s coffee. Not on purpose, of course.

“Dammit, Winfree, you basdard, you’re dripping blood in my coffee. Who in hell authorized you to bleed anyway?” He took a big gulp of coffee mixed with my blood and swished it around in his mouth, then spit it out. “Taste like shit.” He mumbled obscenities while I bled, and he tried to stop the bleeding while mumbling obscenities.

My drill sergeant was not a writer. He was a sergeant first class with twelve years in the United States Army. He also drank his coffee black, but he was not a writer. He was a soldier.

*****

I drank my first cup of coffee when I was big enough to reach the coffee pot on my own. That was a long time ago. Then, it was always with three sugars and just enough milk to kill the bite. Then I grew up and became a man craving the dark bitterness denied me in my youth. Black coffee, beautiful and brutal.

Black coffee made me a soldier…and a writer. Black coffee runs through my veins as sure as the blood that sweetened a drill sergeant’s coffee on a cold February day in 1974. Why I was bleeding that day is not important. Men shed blood for all kinds of reasons. But there’s only one way to drink coffee, and that’s hot and black.

Give me coffee, or give me death.

This poem first appeared on Medium.