The Poet Drank Black and Bitter Coffee

The poet drank his black bitter coffee
From a cracked blue saucer
And pondered the dark sky coming down
Coming down with all its bitterness
And the darkness of it filled his soul

It was not fully of his making
Yet he had a hand in the shaping of his world
He remembered the girl that told him
The girl that use to hold him
When his pain set fire to their world

Her words were bright forever
In the corners and the corridors
Of his smoked and broken mind

To many drugs, too much whisky
Had soaked up most of his memories
But traces of his Hilda lingered on the fringes
And her words came through the shadows
That grew forever darker with each sip
Of cold and bitter coffee that he enjoyed

Her song was of tomorrow
And it was filled with sorrow
An aching and a sadness
For their love that once consumed them
Was fading faster than a rainbow from the sky

He wished now that he had heeded
Her soft and plaintive pleadings
But the hour was now too late upon his mind

The guns outside still thundered
As the poet drank he wondered
How long before the mad ones
The hunters, the loners, the sad ones
Look inside this dirty window
And saw him sitting in the moonlight
Waiting for his last day to end

He cherished each word that he had written
To cause the masses to rise up against a tyrant
That wanted to be a ruler of the world
Now the tyrant’s brave new world order
Had came crashing down around him
Fuelled by the poet’s words of freedom
And now it lay in ashes heaped upon his soul
And the poet knew he would not escape
The tyrant’s wrath and anger
It would only be a moment until
His day and night would be shattered
And sweet Hilda would laugh and tell him
That this was all of his own doing
No bitter tears would she cry for him

Outside the guns still thundered
The crowd, looted, raped and plundered
Setting fire to those in their way

So the poet sipped cold and bitter coffee
From the cracked blue saucer in his hand
He listened for his heartbeat
But it was nowhere to be found
He listened for the footsteps
As his head rested on the damp ground
The coffee turned to blood
And Hilda still spoke inside his dying mind

The cracked blue saucer was now broken
A sad and lonely token of a better time
The poet’s words of freedom
Died and faded with him
Never to be spoken of again

The poet drank his black bitter coffee
From a cracked blue saucer
And pondered the dark sky coming down
Coming down with all its bitterness
And the darkness of it filled his soul