Midnight Drunkard
A toast to the midnight drunk of yore,
last ordered and time gentlemen pleased
at the end of a twelve pint Friday night,
peerless in his magnanimity of good nighting,
back slapping, and nudging and winking
not to do anything he wouldn't do,
to a brewer's droop of more or less legless.
Finding himself alone, wall leaning and groaning,
hissing and sighing a jet of steaming pee
against a darkened alley's convenient wall,
with the world closing down around him.
Shaking off a doze, and bouncing off the corner
into lonely gaslight, blinking and damply undone;
panning half circle for a bearing, jabbing a finger,
and lurching notionally homeward astride the gutter,
one leg locked to match the stolen inches of the other,
adding pocket slapping to his peg-legged progress,
and finding a lighter to kindle a mangled cigarette,
against the will of wind gusts and a spitting sky.
Passing barren parlour shops along the "top road",
allowing himself to be sucked into a side street
along with the wind and rain, gateway to a warren
of terraces, and a world emptied of all sentient life,
save for a tumbleweed newspaper, skidding and
skittering fretfully away from something dreadful.
Befuddled imagination conjuring demons,
setting him babbling denials to the looming
apparition of a mother-in-law moon; she,
scolding and drawing a dismissive dark veil
across her pockmarked countenance; he
shaking a fist, and disputing the fading echo
that her Elsie could have done much better.
"Oopsadaisie", and hanging on to his steadfast friend
the corner shop lamppost to stop himself falling off the earth;
becoming maudlin sentimental and serenading his old fluted pal,
with a "Show me the way to go home", then a robust snatch
of "Maggie May" and her world-renowned unmentionables.
Tottering on towards his own two-up-and-two-down castle,
nose thumbing and ear wiggling a mirthful pantomime
at the listening window of the street's long widowed know-it-all;
chortling and shushing himself for twenty tiptoed paces, then,
like a deviant street urchin out of cuffing distance, turning,
hands cupped about his mouth, and announcing to all that
'twas a working man's god-given right to drown his sorrows
of a Friday night, and temperance was for spinsters and sissies.
At the last, boxing shadows, like a bare knuckleman,
with a cock-a-doodle-doo, and a "Come on out and fight",
in all the languages and dialects of the world.
