Not liking Monday is no excuse

My first day in the office after a full month's break.  I can't remember the last time I had such a long period of leave.  The world of work was mercifully gentle with me though ... if you discount the half-hour phone call from a man who told me I had treated him unfairly, had acted unprofessionally, had humiliated him and led-him-on at personal cost to him.  That kind of call could happen any Monday so there's no need to go 'Boomtown Rats' simply because a slightly eccentric character is disappointed that he didn't get an invitation to an interview with us.

It helps, perhaps, to remember that I'm paid quite well to think, listen and talk sense.  I don't dig ditches, slaughter cattle in an abattoir, leap out of planes to parachute into enemy territory then kill people or clean public lavatories after a football match.  So what if I'd rather not have ended my holiday break? It's Monday.  Tomorrow there will be work to do.  So shut the fuck up with your complaining and get to bed.

We do not serve if we but stand and wait

Bring on night's soft embrace, its gentle touch
Which like the unrequited lover's kiss
Caresses not to fire the flames of bliss
But to arrest the soul excited overmuch
By dreams ambition's fingers fail to clutch;
By hopes our feckless schemes must miss;
By all the ways we yearn for more than this,
For lives of something more than such and such
Or this and that, here and there, now and again:
That great cacophony of nothing untoward
Muttered over dinner plates in dismal rooms;
That silent scream of "if not now then when?"
Drowning out the sound of youth's lost chord;
Resounding for eternity in old men's tombs.

Except that it would have been an almost wholly empty day if I had left it there at "get to bed".  Fortunately I heard the words "Bring on night's soft embrace" inside my tired head.  So I said to myself, write a poem; a sonnet, formal, following the rules (of the Italian rhyming scheme as it turns out).  It may not be up to Milton's standards but there it is, half an hour later, in iambic pentameters (give or take) and rhyming abbaabbacdecde.

Now go to bed.
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