3AM Blues
Sit in my lap.
Come, make yourself at home.
Bring the tea; ay, there’s the rub.
Leave your tears at the door.
Leave your fears on the floor.
Grieve for your past no more.
Instead, let’s make a garden hideaway
Within the confines of my four walls.
I’ll draw the fences on your sturdy shoulders:
You can trace the grass on my mound.
You know the place as well as I do,
And yet, I’m the stranger.
And yet, I’m the danger.
Forget it: maybe we were not meant to be.
After all, after all the tea and cakes and ices
We are still bewildered in our crisis.
How are we meant to move on, to pass our love by
When everything we know is static,
Frozen in time, halted by our own fearful design?
I give up.
If we had nowhere to run, I’d understand.
But you and I, we are made for flight.
For ascension into the alcoves.
Moulded for flawless executions of the problems
That life dare throw at us.
And let her:
Let her separate the skies and the seas,
Let her separate you who stands foolishly besides me.
Let us teach her all is not as it seems.
So fall into bed with me.
Wake into hell with me.
We’ll traverse the stairs like beaten workhorses,
And gaze at stars imprisoned in their glassy carcasses.
The morning after our hedonistic trial
We’ll lay apart, you on the witness stand
Until the judge’s verdict rings clear -
Until, beneath the music from a further room
Plays crescendos loud and sonorous for all to hear -
And you’ll say,
“I never had a love so dear.”
Sit in my lap.
Come, make yourself at home.
Bring the tea; ay, there’s the rub.
Leave your tears at the door.
Leave your fears on the floor.
Grieve for your past no more.
Come, make yourself at home.
Bring the tea; ay, there’s the rub.
Leave your tears at the door.
Leave your fears on the floor.
Grieve for your past no more.
Instead, let’s make a garden hideaway
Within the confines of my four walls.
I’ll draw the fences on your sturdy shoulders:
You can trace the grass on my mound.
You know the place as well as I do,
And yet, I’m the stranger.
And yet, I’m the danger.
Forget it: maybe we were not meant to be.
After all, after all the tea and cakes and ices
We are still bewildered in our crisis.
How are we meant to move on, to pass our love by
When everything we know is static,
Frozen in time, halted by our own fearful design?
I give up.
If we had nowhere to run, I’d understand.
But you and I, we are made for flight.
For ascension into the alcoves.
Moulded for flawless executions of the problems
That life dare throw at us.
And let her:
Let her separate the skies and the seas,
Let her separate you who stands foolishly besides me.
Let us teach her all is not as it seems.
So fall into bed with me.
Wake into hell with me.
We’ll traverse the stairs like beaten workhorses,
And gaze at stars imprisoned in their glassy carcasses.
The morning after our hedonistic trial
We’ll lay apart, you on the witness stand
Until the judge’s verdict rings clear -
Until, beneath the music from a further room
Plays crescendos loud and sonorous for all to hear -
And you’ll say,
“I never had a love so dear.”
Sit in my lap.
Come, make yourself at home.
Bring the tea; ay, there’s the rub.
Leave your tears at the door.
Leave your fears on the floor.
Grieve for your past no more.
♠ ♠ ♠
I must add there are certain allusions to favourite poems and texts of mine in this; most significantly, T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which is possibly one of the dearest and most exhilarating pieces of writing I have ever read, but also Shakespeare's Hamlet, to which the line,"Ay, there's the rub," was taken directly from Hamlet's soliloquy in the Third Act. I cannot do either of these beautiful bountiful works justice by any means, but I wrote this when I woke from the fourth or fifth night of repetitive nightmares this week and for some reason, those lines from Hamlet and Prufrock (with additional lines from the latter) came flooding into me and suddenly I was overwhelmed, and it became this poem.
Additional apologies centre on the (hopefully subtle) innuendo and the odd rhyming scheme, but in my defence, waking up in the dead of night out of schedule does tend to wreak havoc on the mind.