Annie Morris

Pinot noir is the new merlot.

Mustard the new salsa.

Zoloft used to be the new Prozac,

but now it’s Lexapro.

Wireless is the new wired.

Words aren’t printed anymore:

they’re posted on the net.

Who knows if in ten years

there will still be books

or either one of us?

Marriage is the new divorce.

Abstinence the new desire.

Before I met you, Annie, I didn’t know

how meek I was or how angry

or anyone who’d lived

as many lives as you,

the long-haired and entirely romantic,

the always-looking-thirty-five.

So much has changed

the old routine. You’ve married

your bonnie boy and moved away.

Now to whom can I complain

my same old complaints and

to whom can I open my heart?

To no one, dear friend,

have I ever opened my heart.

Avalon

About to seek a new life overseas, as if to Avalon

he goes, he speaks so strangely of his taking leave—

no job, no flat, no health protection

for his grave disease. My friend confessed

to me that what he held most dear was not

his chaired professorship, his academic work

the decades he spent steering students

through the cantos and the odes. But those two years

with his man—their nights of books and talk,

wine with friends, chicken in the pot:

the old rages roaring but the heart caught.

Now the good lease is up. His Arthur’s in the vale,

salted in the urn, and my friend’s gone

to seek the grievous world again or Avalon.

Sleepless Johnston

About Norman Johnston, who almost got away…

When the city lights came on

and the air turned gray,

Sleepless Johnston finished filing through

his bars and ran away.

He flew through Pennsylvania

in a green hot-wired Olds.

He left a dummy on his cot

made of prison clothes.

Had coins to call his cousins

and marathon running shoes—

the gifts of a nurse who loved him

or wanted some of his loot.

Johnston, they said, had millions tied

up in high-tech stocks,

or hidden away in Cayman banks

or stuffed in a cardboard box.

But maybe he had nothing left

and was after black revenge,

was weary of doing life in jail

and had to go home again.

He dreamed his mom would fry him eggs,

let him bathe and sleep

a good long sleep to die for

on daisy-covered sheets.

But Johnston was a menace—a thief

and murderer as well.

He shot three young men at least

and killed a teenage girl.

Forty grand the lawmen promised;

a price they swore they'd pay

to any soul who'd help them catch

this cunning runaway.

In a tavern a trooper saw him

having a smoke and a beer,

but Sleepless fled like a vision of Elvis

when the cop came near.

Oh, there were plenty of sightings

though most of them were fake.

Line workers called in phony clues

for slippery Johnston's sake.

He haunted all the pay phones

begging cousins for a bed.

Yet most hung up when Sleepless rang.

At last one kinsman said:

The law has us surrounded.

You can't come over here.

Keep running, man. Wing like a bat

or hide like a deer.

But after twenty years in jail

familiar woods were few.

Developers had subdivided

the countryside he knew.

Patrol cars right behind him

in front the rising sun,

Johnston went down a cul-de-sac.

Folks called 911.

No dogs, no guns, no searchlights

only rest and peace

were the things that Sleepless wanted

as he walked to the police,

and gave up by a bird bath—

exhausted, nearly dead.

Sleepless held out his two hands

for cuffs, some chow, a bed.

He hadn't any millions

just his pants and shirt

and those fancy track shoes,

and the lost hope of the nurse.

Note: This ballad is about Norman Johnston, a member of the notorious Johnston crime family, which had operated in and around rural Chester County, Pennsylvania. Norman Johnston escaped from Huntingdon Prison in central Pennsylvania and was on the run for 18 days in August of 1999 before being caught in Pennsylvania near the Maryland border.

“Sleepless Johnston” first appeared in Lyrical Ballads.