Good Morning, Istanbul

I crawled one thousand miles south of the city,
thought I would follow your smoke signal home.
Find you on the porch, with your pipe in hand,
but I got there and you were gone.

The smoke that remains, was from a book you had burned,
a book I wrote too may words in.
You flew five thousand miles east across the sea,
to write better stories than I could.

Good morning, Istanbul,
Do you miss my hellos.
There were an awful lot of them.

Now I'm writing words in the books of gentlemen,
Scoundrels I should never have met.
The handwriting's sloppy and the story
melancholy, but at least I am writing at all.

Good morning, Istanbul,
Do you miss my hellos.
There were an awful lot of them.

Did you keep even one page of the stories we lived?
Or have you left them in sweet Alabama?