ManicDDaily

New Year’s Bring

What the new year brings to you will depend a great deal on what you bring to the new year.”
–Vern McClellan

I consider potato salad,
but potato salad sort of says
‘summer.’

‘Focus’ sounds better,
but smacks of discipline,
and discipline sounds
like a bummer.

I’ve never owned a brand new car
but would never stoop–which I know doesn’t make sense
given its geometry or price, but at least rhymes–
to a Hummer.

Besides, what new year times
most raise in me
is the wish to do
a runner.

But, here I am–
an Eve past the eve,
sans potato salad,
with an undistinguished car
full of undistinguished dings
and no clear thought of what to bring
to that great ring ring
just knelled–

There just seems nothing in my fate
that is not well past
its best-used-by date
(and long ago not sold.)

I grow old, I grow old,
I shall wear my trousers
rolled–

hisses the poet, or his
doppleganger,
through my rumpled brain folds–

Sigh.

Yet the whimper-worn words also wrangle
a sly bang–

for I’ve always rather liked
rolled trousers.

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For Susie Clevenger’s prompt on the New Year on With Real Toads to write a poem on a New Year aphorism.  (Also, although it is not a particular numeric milestone, I just realized with some astonishment that this is my 1905th post on this blog.  Crazy.)