poem of the day 01.03.11

here's hoping the new year treated everyone right.

inside the blizzard speaks

i sit in here with a sore back
sore shoulders and gloom
black and blue to the very core of me

mainlining decaffeinated tea
and hersey’s chocolate

while outside the blizzard taunts me

i’m thinking of giving up joy
as i clean snot from a sick cat’s nose

shielding my eyes from the
soft light of the living room lamp

while inside the blizzard speaks
in wicked tongues

i take shots of scotch for courage
i take pints of beer for medicinal reasons

i drink wine for the gods

and i take digital pictures of abandoned buses
left to rot on deserted avenues
by bureaucratic conglomerates of doom

while the blizzard talks a marathon
of white darkness

i try to read the newspaper with the lights off

watch the television on mute

listen to a radio with no static

taunting the blizzard
to stamp its feet and hold its breath
to prove that it’s alive

i help shovel the snow for this old lady
on the next block

together we’re coaxing the time away
telling each other our life stories
as the plows make figure eights on the street

and old men watch me from their windows
making sure that i don’t bury their car
with my desolation

i think maybe next year is the year
that i’ll find the good in humanity
hiding in a brooklyn subway station

i’ll find out where
all of the other poets went to die
and i’ll send them my resolutions
along with my condolences and ambivalence

tell them that i can’t do this anymore

that i’m thinking of taking up painting

creating a mural from memory
one not of sorrow but of liberation

how i’m trying to forget dates and names
before i have the time to remember them

that i’m flushing it all out
tearing down the calendar
and putting up negative space

giving myself a spring cleaning of the soul
before it’s too late

gurgling drano
to escape the taste of time
and the loss of youth

as the blizzard sticks out its tongue
and does a cartwheel down 75th and colonial

rolling away like so much rot
destroying everything in its path

that isn’t bolted down
or glued to the cracked and aged concrete
in this splendid city of the have and have nots.