Come Here! Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

Out drinking with a friend at the Hummingbird
a little worse for wear I find myself

buying a third red wine for a beautiful young woman
who is weaving herself around

her eyes distant somewhere between dreamy
and stoned - trying to set on a shifting horizon...

drifting, she is trying to focus, to find something
gladly accepting the offer to sit with us.

After awhile, though I am very much older
she seems to take a shine to me and my repartee:

Me waxing lyrical in the magically relaxed
mode that comes upon me when I'm charming women.

Dis-engagingly, I tell her that my friend
and I are gay-bent but she just laughs - another of my corny jokes.

At the close, I offer to find and pay for a taxi
but she insists on an earlier offer of a late-night coffee at my place.

I put her to bed gently and lovingly,
her pretty, blonde curls dead to the world on my pillow.

Later, sleeping on the couch
I am summoned by an as yet unfallen angel intent on rimming the abyss.