2024: hours to go–
Til the New Year’s Party’s over and
Aileen leans in to show me a meme, a little dated, about being sedated by the Ramones:
Twenty, twenty-four hours to go.

That’s how this leap year lept in: on word play, a guffaw, and a grin. And: THAT’S IT!
That’s my goal for 2024. That’s all. That’s it:

To play with words and laugh along to poetry and song,
joke and jape all night long–right or wrong–
With a throng of my favorite people to ring it in with–
Including and increasingly especially always–ME.

Nothing else needs doing or achieving except being. Accept BEING.
It is my goal that that finally be enough for me.

For, I have spent all the years before 2024–up to and including 2023–
making lists of buckets and wishes of all the things
I need to do or be.

So, new year, new list usually–but NO!–not this!
This time I want only one–okay, maybe a few–things:

To curate and appreciate all that did accumulate before 2024
to make it what it is already about to be.

NO YEAR IS NEW. YET, EVERY YEAR, IT’S TRUE–
We all set out to improve ourselves in the DEAD OF WINTER

When all the smart mammals are out there staying in:
hibernating
gestating
incubating
investing in their future
by staying asleep–perchance to dream

Of what’s soon coming: life and love in store. But they don’t start acting on those mores until the actual (fucking) Spring.

So, my only goal for now is to sit back and marvel how I even got here to THIS place and time of being.

It’s the start of 2024, and my one and only chore is to see what happens next without expecting a single thing…

Except maybe some more laughs and a few hours left to pass…

Til 2025 has me sedately asking myself the exact same thing.

(Who knows by then what the answer will be?)