For twenty-five years along ‘Two Street’
Always drunk to the rotten core
He never knew morning, except as the time
That they opened the tavern door

Everyone hailed that lost reprobate
With cat call and merciless jeer
‘there’s Ernie the wino, let’s see if the fool
Will dance and sing for a beer!’

Ernie McPherson (name changed to protect
The family he chose to forsake)
Once a hell-of-a-man, now a man gone to hell
Just a panhandler, out on the take

He begs for a quarter, not often he eats
He shares his port wine at the park
In the summer the riverbank serves as his home
Comes winter, it’s too cold and dark

So freeze-up finds Ernie in doorways
Or in shelters where Jesus is preached
The hallways of warm office buildings
When security there can be breached

I’m sorry for people like Ernie
They’ve crossed a dimension in mind
And stagger the streets of the old mining camp
Unknowing; stone drunk and heart-blind

What they’ve lost are life’s precious possessions
One spin at the wheel and you’re done
On a cold Christmas morning in Fairbanks
Somehow Ernie found him a gun

It was twenty-five years there on Two Street
Twenty-five, wasted for what?
In a moment of half lucid memory
A heart rending cry, then the shot

They rush from the stools and the back bar
To the alley from whence came the sound
“Ah, hell; it’s only old Ernie,
Laying dead in the snow on the ground”

Somewhere across town cries a siren
Tomorrow, somewhere, tears will fall
A drunk; a worthless old wino?
Yet a father, there’s some will recall

Each year a bouquet of Forget-Me-Nots
Are laid o’er a grave on Birch Hill
With the soft whispered words from a daughter’s lips
“I love you Dad, I always will.”