Wish I could write you a song of love and ask
‘Why don’t you ring me anymore?’
But that’ the line of a song I heard many times before.
Recall tunes from the fifties,
when I thought that our rulers were the good guys in white hats
and life was simple,
but those songs are banal now,
yet I used to sing them with joyous heart finding the lyrics lovely,
those days when I believed in the Reader’s Digest
and what the papers said.

Wish I could write you a song of love and sing:
‘Rose Mary I love you, I love you with all my heart’
That’s from a musical
and are corny now,
like when I told a taxi driver in New York,
that I was a commie,
he laughed said he was a FBI agent too,
we had a drink in a bar next door
to an expensive shoe shop on the fifth avenue
and got to drive his taxi.
Wish I could write you a song of love,
but my cynical heart lacks conviction.