Lingering In the Small Hours.

Three have rung since midnight,

My pen paws and waits

As I collect my still friends,

Those quietly yearning thoughts

That meditate and wait,

Till we begin the call to hunt.

Friends and my mates

Away in the distance,

Perhaps by some need,

Have communed, and are

Still on churning walls

That call to webs,

Which stretch net-like

To catch collected feeling.

Over, and down hills

We chase the essence

Of my ticking heart,

My Lady, she so fair

I map every point,

Of her soul on body

That wears it's beauty.

Complexity that beguiles

Yet with no wiles,

Save her I's and My's.

Glen Goyne calls to us

As Baileys raises glass,

But we can't answer.

Constitution of body

Allows not sweet partake,

Of that sublime spirit

Trickling from Emerald Isle,

And my anguished wail

Travels the Highlands.

The silvered packets

Of eight and ten,

Attest my morning elegy.

The cigarette burns

Consumed by intake,

I hold it 'twixt fingers

That casually flick ash,

And then a question.

What smokes me?

Must I rhyme,

Continue my pantomime?

Should this be dropped

And that left behind?

Could I change my ways

To swim in strange streams?

Would I care to listen

That someone writes my dreams?

And I wonder

As I'm wont to do,

Does all end well?

In fire or ice, or

The urinal of want,

In some obscure corner

Of a garbage dump;

Will we find on the floor

Like in bad cups of chai,

The sodden dregs

Of our dreary world?

But now as before

I must content being,

With the songs of redemption

That Jamaican lustily sang.

He who was shot with lead

Still believed and said,

Love and peace my brethren.

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