last year’s arrived like a stone

from a slingshot.

Paintings awoke on our walls.

One song followed another and then another

until the sun went down like weak tea

and we couldn’t speak.

Not to mention the cocky superheroes,

Beelzebub’s ballerinas and princesses,

and the Plutonian Sponge Bobs

all begging and booing and asking us

to smell their dirty little feet

as if we looked to them like candy

wrappers strewn across a lawn.

Trick or treat said the beers to our stomachs.

And when the darkness finally crescendoed,

we withered and shriveled and fell.

And then the guitars broke us as always

and we lurched into city buses

like stones skipping across a pond just before

plunk.  And the loneliness that blew through us

was not even our own.

 

 

Photo By: Naoko Takano