Treasure Chest {a poem}
On New Year's Eve, don't go
looking for a poem, forget tidy endings,
even good tidings may have to be set aside
in favor of something with more of a bite
after a year that gave us more
to chew on than is reasonable.
I sit here in my warm kitchen
and somewhere, you are sitting
as you read these words --
maybe you are elated or surprised
by your own survival or maybe surviving
has left you unable to consider that a poem
could mean anything at all
and that would make sense,
and even if it didn't make sense
we could probably all agree that sense
may well have died this year,
though some people finally came to their senses
and some people lost their sense of smell
and taste and some people did their very goddamn
best to stay safe and died anyway,
and this is the thing -- you knew no poem
on the last day of 2020 could get very far
without death, didn't you?
If you are breathing on your own,
if you are able to love
one single other being in this world,
you don't even have to know the names
of the arteries and which ones go in
and which ones go out
to know that you benefit
from this divine system we call life.
It's the other systems, the man-made ones
that fuck us, fail to honor the magnificence
of our most intrinsic beings,
exploit and dispose --
it is these that must fall,
like old statues and statutes.
Because as January peeks around the curvature
of the ever-turning planet, it has one message
for us: We are fragile. We are holy. We are worthy.
If you don't believe me, go look
at the sky, go look in the mirror, go look
at your baby pictures, go look at your dog's eyes,
go look at the one piece of art you have hung
in every place you've ever called home,
go sit somewhere for a moment, eyes closed or open,
hand on chest, and feel it -- the drum
of time, in your very own treasure chest.