New Year's Eve Party in the Neighborhood with Children

 When I told Alex

“It was the worst year of my life!”
and Kathryn smiled and said 
“She’s not lying!” and we all
laughed because “me too!”
it really had me
loving misery.

That old spirit of ‘33.

His last good year was ‘97,

an unbroachable ‘90’s bar.

Mine was 2019,

with its murmuration start.

But Kathryn, queen, lets no year claim the crown.

Nothing has to come of it,

art need not be made

each precious, awful year,

full-throated worseness

is love, there is no 

routine

no 

expectations

this is not 

a life instead

it is what I always wanted.

A life is someone else’s problem,

a story

a teenaged boy tells himself;

not my voice a room away,

in childhood’s haunted party style,

not December’s nonlinear

accumulation of gnomes,

not three adults who

are happy to say 

they all suffered last year, but this one,

who knows