Friday, January 2, 2015

it is 2:11 am and the air is cold.

the world celebrates;
a new year has arrived.
the others clearly hear it marching in
with trumpeters and fanfare,
lumbering at them like
Joe DiMaggio or Neil Armstrong,
ticker tape parade style.

to me, it is the nose on my face.
has it changed since yesterday? surely.
i am at a loss to tell you how,
but change is inescapable,
so i trust it is true.
i suppose i simply
can't see the parade from where i sit.

it was ok, maybe even a little cool,
to turn 10 and have a 2-digit age,
but how-does-it-feel-to-be-10??
always struck me as odd,
even that day, as
it didn't feel much different than
9 years and 364 days, really,
so i never knew what to say.

now i know what to say,
so i repeatedly tell people that
every day of my life is a New Year.

they sip and dance and hug and kiss
and i am left to wonder how they celebrate
the other 364 New Years Days of their lives
every calendar,
but of course they don't celebrate at all
except for one sad and awkward day,
yet I, somehow, am the strange one.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Happy New Year

happy new year,
they say to me.
but today feels just
like yesterday did—
another now
for me to embrace—
and again i fail
to understand the rules.

happy new year, i reply,
feeling guilty and diseased
because i know my lie
hangs in the air
like an acrid smoke
and stings their faces
like a slap.

i love you, i add,
which is true
because i do,
and because loving people
even when i can't understand them
has always been easy.

happy new year and
i love you, i pronounce,
happy to have sown the seeds
of a glorious truth in the
fertile ground of my lie.

thank yous echo back to me
and happy new years spill my way,
and my i love yous lay in shards,
broken, on the ground,
obstacles to navigate,
awkward and dangerous,
like me.