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
