The Last Flight of Kelly
The Last Flight of Kelly
The City glow
Was furnace low,
In fact, it had come to a flicker,
In the rising doom
Of the early gloom
As morning crept on quicker;
And Kelly drank
A lonely drink,
As he washed the last one down,
The start of the day
Was the price to pay
at the end of a night on the town;
The end of a night
Of the Devil's delight,
With the laughs and carousing gone,
And that which remained
Was remorse and was pain
And the cold, cruel light of the dawn,
And to take another
Belt for the road,
In the life of the lifting fog,
To wait for the show
To begin again,
And to have the hair of the dog;
So Kelly drank
Another drink,
And things came passing strange,
And the feeling odd
That a demon or God
Or whiskey had made a change;
The thought that he heard
Was to fly as a bird,
Without a lesson or care,
And never a wing
But his arms to fling,
And he rose up in the air;
He rose through the air
On the whisper of wind,
In a bulk that was lighter than light,
And swept on an arc
Through the melting of dark
In the vanishing film of the night;
He soared as an eagle
Spans over the miles,
On time and eternity spying,
And his soul came to know
The feel and the glow
In the wild abandon of flying;
And he thought and he thought
Much more than was good
On how he did what he was doing,
For sometimes the why
of what has gone by
can turn out to be the undoing;
As a man tells his son
About tying a tie,
And then cannot do it at all,
Or a golfer correcting
The hook in his drive,
Who swings and misses the ball;
Kelly pondered on things
Such as having no wings,
And that earth was really his level,
And a dark feeling grew
Which led to the view
That his trip had gone to the Devil;
In fact, Kelly thought,
With a deep, heartfelt ought,
That he wished that the venture might pass,
For a man feels the fool
With the shivering cool
Of the wind through the crack of his ass;
He took a quick draft
From his small silver flask
For courage and fuel aborning,
And crashed in despair,
Beyond all repair,
In the cold, cruel glare of the morning;
Some days when the glow
Of the city is low,
Kelly's voice can heard in the sky,
Sadly sighing that any
Is just one too many,
And never to think when you fly.
– Charles E. Pope, 1983