AWOL - Augie March

Three dozen cycles, give or take a sum,

The sum of that experience — how to keep running.

O I know justice, it’s a birthright if you’re born right,

and I know how handsome is that trick of the light,

So don’t be mistaken in thinking I’ll do right

given the chance to do wrong again and again.

Summer romeos casing the park,

by the uniform urinals of love’s rural province.

O don’t you know time, with its petty vial of sands,

inscrutable face and merciless hands?

And don’t you know love?

It’s a whirlwind of feathers,

tickles you to your nethers and leaves a terrain of despair…

And I know when grief goes unchecked,

There’s a kind of relief in the wreckage for the wrecked…

Weren’t you alone last time I saw you?

How do you keep running from the world and the war?

O I know young fathers who once were like soldiers,

AWOL in flung places

or without standing orders,

Alarming approaches to time and it’s killing,

no victimless crime again and again.

Monday night, Goodies and The Doctor,

Now that bath time’s over, time for pyjamas.

O I know self pity, it begins with nostalgia,

and you’ll die of melancholy if the dolor don’t get ya,

And I know a poem on a wall next to a picture

of a dick and a fanny, by a smear of regret.

And it sings of its own long demise, something about imperium,

and a new sun will rise,

and «O please don’t go with those horrible guys, they only want one thing.»

O please don’t go with those horrible guys, they only want one thing,

Again and again.