The beer is flowing
All hot and high,
Insect repellent on the house-
A restaurant by the roadside.
The streets a little easy
Now that the tears have dried,
But the population still dress in black
For the year the King had died.

I’ve been doing a little dying too,
All the faces I have been,
All the places, all the names;
All the waste I’ve come to see.
It piled in the entryway,
Too many obstacles to leave,
Too desperate to sit and stay,
Witness the death of the autumn leaves.

Too much steady state back at home,
Over here, it’s chaos in the streets,
Used to take a pill to make me calm;
I used to lie and steal and cheat.
I used to have a drink to **** the day,
Now I take a load off of my feet,
Nurse it back and eat well and full;
There’s no trouble in falling asleep.

I see the waitress get a head massage
In the middle of the working day,
I mind my manners a thousand times
Still, my brain does not behave.
*** lingers on every corner,
In every blind-alley retreat,
Every time she smiles at me,
Or hands me my receipt.

Now I sing for life and I sing for death
And neither is full of fear,
Sometimes I tell the world to go to hell-
But at least I sound sincere.
At least my poetry is full of me
And not the absence in between
When I wake in this sober state;
When I fall down to my knees.

This is not the perfect life,
I would never claim it was,
But it’s a thousand shades brighter now,
In the shifting of the fog.
My notebooks are all clean and new,
My eyes alight with love.
This is what true living means,
This is not what dying does.