Poem for the New Year
It's the first week of February
and in my neighborhood all the
Christmas trees are still up
and shimmering in the windows
of the houses and apartment buildings.
Strings of blinking lights
still tangled in the bushes,
plastic icicles hang from wooden
eaves in the afternoon sun.
Nobody’s complaining,
the absurdity is a comfort.
Otherwise we’d have just another
bleak year laid out before us
much like the others,
filled with things that frighten,
things we don't want to know
or think about.
We imagine these silly objects
as scarecrows of sorts,
holding the future dark at bay.
Even the little artificial thing
I threw together in late December
with its gaudy tinsel
and tiny ornaments
still sits glowing
on the desk as I type.
She asks me why
I don’t put it away
and I tell her it’s not
hurting anything.
About the Author: William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and a volume of fiction. His work has been published widely in literary journals, including Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and The Chiron Review. He was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award, and edited Cocky Moon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline (Zeitgeist Press, 2014). His latest poetry collection, A Room Above a Convenience Store, is available from Roadside Press.
Image Credit: Arthur Siegel “Detroit, Michigan. New Year’s party at a nightclub” (1941) Public domain image courtesy of The Library of Congress
As It Ought To Be 