It’s a painful twist, one where the graffiti writer of the present knows more—but actually has or is less—than herself in the past. It’s also an interesting case of using irony to cure irony because those lines, in effect, remind the speaker that she might once have regarded that street scene and funky restaurant if not the world less cuttingly when she was younger. It also tells her there is at least one other human being in the world who feels and regrets the burden of worldly wisdom she is feeling now. The graffiti expresses longing for the lost innocence of youth but also offers a sort of cautionary tale reminding the young not to waste time longing to be older and the older not to waste time longing for youth.  “Damned at every age” is one plausible, if dark, interpretation. Another, of course, is carpe diem: seize the day, enjoy what life serves up to you with all its misspellings and corny stereotypes and war grinding on in the background, because it’s all we have and are going to get.
In the traditional carpe diem poem a man makes a serious and passionate plea (or play) to a woman to relinquish her virginity. Andrew Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress” has come to exemplify the form; other exemplars include Marvell’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” Catullus’s “Let Us Live, My Lesbia, and Let Us Love,” and Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” Originating with Horace, carpe diem embodies a philosophy popular through the ages and seen now in our culture’s insistent YOLO message. Ways of seizing the day typically involve the five senses and include eating and drinking and, of course, making (or exhorting someone to make) love. For further discussion of the carpe diem tradition, see my previous Poetry Sunday column featuring Annie Finch’s poem, “Coy Mistress.”
One reason I read the poem this way is that it takes us on a literal journey. Written entirely in the injunctive mood, it in effect issues orders to its readers: “Pass,” “Have a drink,” “Climb the Stairs,” “Head straight back,” “allow a moment,” and finally, “read” the graffiti scrawled on the bathroom wall. That last is telling, for who can read about poetic lines written on a wall without remembering this famous passage about human mortality from “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám”?

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Like all good allusions in literature, this one amplifies the experience of the readers who “get it” without subtracting from the experience of those who don’t. In any event, the speaker’s injunctions take the reader by the hand to accompany her on a journey, literally from the restaurant to the restroom, but metaphorically from disappointment and detachment to a deeper awareness of and appreciation for the present moment.
I suppose you could read the final lines of today’s poem as the coup de grâce that proves the dark points made earlier about the inevitability of war and of life’s disappointments. I prefer to read it as a postmodern carpe diem poem, one that dispenses with sexual politics and goes to the heart of the matter for human beings of all genders: Life does not last, and we would do well to learn to enjoy it as it is while we are still in it. That message is what, for me, transforms “Sunday Morning at the Caffe Mediterraneum” from a funny, near-sour pronouncement on Berkeley living up to its stereotypes to one that that leads the reader to a deeper understanding of the value of appreciating every quotidian moment, what Warren Zevon called “enjoying every sandwich.” I like to think that after saying today’s poem, the speaker went back into the restaurant for a second “caffe” and a renewed ability to relish the panoply of life unfolding before her.]]>