Wise guys in Presley-style haircuts
mill around the booming jukebox
It's late in the fifties
and there are no hippies
Sweltering October afternoon
So you buy a soda and drink it slowly
Your meagre resources make you lowly
I stand in awe, dazed and wondering
This machine has a hand and a brain
Feed it a coin and it picks your song
Suddenly King Creole is playing
and they all jump like catfish on the pole
I'm no square so I too twitch, turn and jump
Everybody is dancing
and life is a rock'n roll song

I came this far
risked limb and all
in my creaking car
just to see the sea
Lo,what a wondrous sight!

Smarting from that cruel retort
      and the smoke of ages
      that blurred my vision
                    I lost
    a golden opportunity
   to breathe her into me
in one huge gulp of indulgence
          They lose who gaze
                   into
  worlds of reckless abandon

I am thinking with some nostalgia
about the simple but unforgettable things we shared
and how beautiful everything seems now with time gone by

There were four of us clumsy but sturdy Mother's boys
One Sunday best shirt and one Sunday best pair of shoes
We took turns to go to church and proudly wore our shared attire

The other boys on our street - how they envied us our pair of longs!
Gray flannel freshly-laundered with benzine and neatly-ironed
Worn so proudly and revered like a family coat of arms


We shared the near misses and the sore heartbreaks as well
When it wasn't your turn at church she looked around for you
With marble-sized eyes, this girl - the one for whom you fell

I remember the bitter tears I cried when you tore our shirt
And I could not keep my tryst with the one who sent me crazy
The things that we shared - how they broke our hearts sometimes!

But the beauty of it all was there was no malice or avarice
We accepted our fates and guarded the family secret
And none so jealously as I did though I was often in tears

From the outside he is unfinished and grotesque
A figure conjured up by a devilish intelligence
Out to shock the world with his ghoulish antics
For who could find such glee in such contortion
But as always poor **** sapiens is off the mark
For inside this morbid cask of human digression
Lies a trove of bountiful beauty in aesthetic abandon
The beauty inside the man is the work of a maetsro
Poetry that seizes the imagination is his speciality
And music that arrests even the gods is his forte
So be not hasty to judge what you see before you
Let the scales that blind your inner vision drop off
And there before your newly-tutored eyes
Will lie an essence of such beauty as you can never imagine
Loudly proclaiming the worth of the person inside the shell
And how disability is only a layer that when peeled off
Unveils the inimitable jewel inside in its range and depth