Myself i held with surety, and tighter still my intuitions
And every action or conscious idea I perceived right
But after the shadow of your burden shaded my mind,
I took my gleeful optimism into your crimson night.

Where kettles and pipes and burning cigarettes,
Filled my nose with scents of foreign avenues,
And jangley buskers crooned into sweltering evenings,
With anodyne preachers sermonizing ‘round the fescues.

And midnight walkers- shades to the dark,
Beats of the beaten left out in the world,
Would pass our meager partition
Above which hung the nation unfurled.

In early morning six by six shackles
Walls stained from years of fire and tar
The end always seemed so near
And the world too far