chai or love [rubai]

there's no fixed time   for chai or love
there's bitter rhyme   in chai or love
there's sweetness   & fresh wakefulness
no wonder I'm   in chai or love

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With thanks (or apologies) to Annie Zaidi's blogo-meditation, Connoisseurs and lovers. Chai-drinking is a theme on which she waxes eloquent from time to time -- such as here and here.

ps: come to think of it, using "I'm" as the surprise word of the rubai, has an antecedent in my land's popular culture: the line You forget I'm in America (from the song "America," in the 1950s Broadway musical drama West Side Story. That line rhymes with -- and follows -- Terrible time in America). I've just now looked at several websites purporting to present the lyrics of this song, and none of them display this line! But I certainly remember it withal.

Further to note: this is the first I'd noticed traces of Persian prosody (with radif and internal rhyme) influencing the (then)-young lyricist Stephen Sondheim. I'd bet you a cup of chai he extrapolated this from Edward Fitzgerald. (I mean, where else? Many of E.F.'s verse-versions of Khayyam don't exhibit the phrase-repetition; but some do. Any lyricist worth his salt might take a lesson from that -- as [I'm speculating] did the redoubtable Sondheim.)