69 // via Strange Neural Pathways: More Poetry
Part of being a journalist is the realization that you will never truly have another holiday off like the rest of the normal world. It’s OK, it comes with the job. Well, OK sometimes. This year, in return for not having to work Christmas Day, I took New Year’s Day.
I got to the newsroom earlyish, and there was no one there. It was peaceful, quiet. Being on your own in a newsroom, normally a place of noise and activity, with nothing but a buzzing scanner for company, is almost a spiritual experience
I think this poem came out of that reverie. It’s a reflection on the night before, spent welcoming in the New Year with my wife at a bar called Firestone’s. I occasionally like to play with rhyming, which you can see here:
New Year’s Day 2010
I can see the mountains as I leave my house out along Shifferstadt Drive
Like they’ve always been there, those lumbering bastards
Speckled
with
snow
and
half dead trees
And here I am, on my way to work along roads that on busier days are more alive
As sleeping revelers from the night before slough off revelry, those slumbering bastards
A flash
party pop
and
dead drunk girl
At the bar, sleepy-eyed from too much booze, I could sense inside her, in this upscale dive,
Date-hatred that has shackled her to this bar-rail boyfriend, that encumbering bastard
Crush
people
roaring
and
Globe
descending
ticking off the year
That numbering bastard.
3 …
2 …
1 …
