The New Year

Every year I used to recollect and
reflect upon the truth and “what it
seems” of all things.

Friends are my teachers, and we take
long walks with journals and push until
the envelope bends to breaking point.

Send it…

Truth’s ironic, the mundane poetic
as we let go of sounds and
“sounds like” in place of pain,
inventing sadness out of rain
much in the way rainbows calm clouds
out of hiding, resulting in misty gold.

Onion rings, things and peace, from
atop South American jungle waterfalls
the truth it rings, and so the balls drop
off of buildings, and we check another Roman
calendar—it makes sense, the suns
and planets doing their thing, ours to record.

Chuckling to connect dots we take
words and take them apart, ones that
never knew they rhymed together chime their
butterfly wing alarms, ride off into the sunset,
lovers at last. We pick up an old book, watch an
old movie, hear an old song and are sure we
must have been married to a different life
before.

Reincarnation’s not for me to expound
as another year goes down, the last of this exploding
in illegal fireworks down the street.

I’ve seen, heard and felt the fragrance
of laughter, the scent of forever in moments
as dead as light in a cave to a submarined
revolutionary thought.

We must come to the surface.

The unity is bound to be what it was always,
descending from a Higher Power. Because we are
so different, the need for one center will drive
the nations forward in prayer as we collect
data, scrape and dust, re-create our day
a smile of hope lighting the way…
the cave opened, the vessel its lighthouse
shining, the connections more and more
evident until…

Until….

Stuck in eternity we cannot improve the
world, Lao Tsu was right, but we’ll try,
and in that says Dickens’ Mrs. Chick we’ve done
enough to be alive.

“Yeah,” says Wyatt Earp, a quick belch
from Mary Poppins call it a burp, a spoonful of
sweet remembering cancels out the quenching
fire of nothing, making it everything.

The same thing. Happy New Year, Borges.