birthdays rush in where damn fools fear to tread

More scribble than poem. Sometimes, you’ve just gotta scribble.

Once more, into the reckoning

I should not have set this course; it is late
And I am hoarse, in every way I know to speak, sing, voice or pen.
Yet not to wrestle with this gloaming, battered jawed and broken poeming,
Seems at best a wasted moment, worst a sin.
Still what is left to fathom in this floundering toward human
In these last hours of this last day, my closing year
Where I am annulled in all-but-certainty that the morning, looming near
Is bereft of breath and solace, comes bearing gifts of fear?

I try not to think of what exists beyond this forced communion
With myself, my health, this hunkering, as the world devolves in dread,
Where around the feted maypole would-be gunsels flail in poppet union
To the ravings of a fatted fool in his gilded crown of lead
Who roams the halls of consequence unrestrained by thought or law,
Regaling gullibility with a vulgar monkey’s paw
As visions of aspired success swirl within his frightwig head,
And a nation unearths burning lawns to inter its swell of dead.

What do you call a reckoning as the soul of midnight creeps
Into the very question of what magic we can keep,
Our horizons piled like cordwood with the husks of so much loss,
As we as peel off our skin and bleach our bones, denyful of the cost?
You call it failure, I suppose, as it trundles without clothes
Into the distance, slouching to avoid its own reflection
Within mirrors and tidal pools, murder knives and burnished jewels
That unmask a perfect lack of self-reflection.

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