ManicDDaily

The wonderful Shawna is hosting a dVerse Poets Pub poetics prompt on “1999”.  (I have to confess to having spent the whole day writing about 1969, till I realized I’d missed a digit!)

But 1999 had its own ethos, so I slowly, awkwardly, switched gears/years.  (1969, in this case, will have to come later.)

Winter Break, 1999

I remember at the Christmas party edge
of Y2K, the DUI guy telling me
how he planned to sneak a new license
once the DMV went down.

And how so many worried that planes
would crash that prices for flights
leaving New York City New Year’s Eve
plummeted, even flights across
the world with free champagne.

What a pain it was back then to
get to Lower Broadway from the
West-–you had to either go through
the Towers or around, and it was
a long long way around–

Taking a break upstate, where the power did go out,
not because of the glitch of far computer, but
wires down nearby, a thick wet snow
webbing all in glassine sparkle–

Going through a long hike too,
the Towers’ lobbies maddeningly
grandiose, soaring glass bordered by the swish
of world flags, red carpet as
thick as a wad of wonga–

With no heat, we laid fires for
the others, finding our own in the
flicker of sculpted muscle against
smooth skin; how mad it felt,
that really and truly caring
what others thought, we
dared try for the real and true–

And yet, how glad–to be
in your close, warm arms
and not on one
of those cheap world flights, not because
I feared the planes would crash–no, that
just wasn’t one of the things I worried about
back then, planes crashing–

(PS – beautiful photo is candlelit snow igloo made by certain family members at the time of a later snow.)