Cascading, at scale,
eye service,
watching,
int'resting, virtue really,

worth, feel touched,
touched in the head, late onset berdach.

Nah, tubes tied, abortions never needed.
but what, eight billion eaters on a world,
Malthusian Darwinian,
luck of the draw,

live hard, die young.

Too late. I sigh, and make peace
with that one old joke,
I am too old, to be the youngest anything.

I saw Sting in the lobby this morning, we were going out and he was coming in. Lisa nudged me, “Sting” was all she whispered. He was with a woman and a man. The woman was talking to the doorman. Sting was dressed all in black except for a long stark-white cashmere scarf, he was chatting and working a dark-gray French-flat-cap around in his hands. His hair is very short and white.

We wanted to walk in the snow, if only for a minute.
A gust of wind caught us as we reached the sidewalk. The two American flags, on either side of the entrance, went rigid, at 9-o’clock as if saluting us. “Jeeez!” I said, like the Georgia girl I am - or was. “Don’t be a baby,” Lisa answered, like a true, pittyless New Yorker but her cheeks had turned a child-like pink. She flipped up her collar.

I patted my pocket, relieved to feel my phone and know that if we froze to death the authorities could use “find my friends” to locate our bodies.

Leeza joins us a moment later and I can’t help but notice that she’s dressed like it’s a cool fall day. Back in the day, when my brother would dress like summer even though temperatures in Georgia had dipped cruelly into the fifties. Seeing him, my mom would say, “Where there’s no sense, there’s no feeling,” but I don’t.

“Did you see Sting?” I asked Leeza (12). She gives me a blank look. “Sting”, I said, “the lead singer for The Police?” I add, as clarification. “I don’t know who that is,” she says flatly. “He was famous,” I say in surrender, “a long time ago, in the 90s.” Maybe the next generation won’t be as celebrity driven.

Thank God Lisa suggested I pin my artist-beret down or it would have blown away, like my resolve to walk in the snow. Still, I followed Lisa into the park like a cat on a leash - unwilling to be seen as any less Canadian. The show crunched like we were trampling over snow-cones.

Trees began turning away the wind as we entered Central Park, “I think we may survive.” I said cheerfully. Just because you're freezing to death doesn’t mean you can’t be ​​affable.

Why don’t pigeons freeze to death - I thought birds flew south for the winter?

The Century’s Wake
by Michael R. Burch

(lines written at the close of the 20th century and introduction of the 21st century)

Take me home. The party is over,
the century passed—no time for a lover.
And my heart grew heavy
as the fireworks hissed through the dark
over Central Park,
past high-towering spires to some backwoods levee,

hurtling banner-hung docks to the torchlit seas.
And my heart grew heavy;
I felt its disease—
its apathy,
wanting the bright, rhapsodic display
to last more than a single day.

If decay was its rite,
now it has learned to long
for something with more intensity,
more gaudy passion, more song—
like the huddled gay masses,
the wildly-cheering throng.

You ask me—
“How can this be?”
A little more flair,
or perhaps only a little more clarity.
I leave her tonight to the century’s wake;
she disappoints me.

Originally published by The Centrifugal Eye. Keywords/Tags: new, century, wake, new year, party, Central Park, fireworks, song, display

A stop that my heart know.
Where I said goodbye, I have to go.
A stop that my mind could remember.
Where he held me gently and kissed my temple.
I am not drunk, I was sober.
He poured too much butterflies in me that made me tremble.

Borodin's On the Steppes of Central Asia

Lost in a remote province of the mind
A youth attends to the cheap gramophone
Again: On the Steppes of Central Asia,
A recording by a mill town orchestra
Of no repute.  But it is magic still:
While washing his face and dressing for work
In a clean, pressed uniform of defeat,
For ten glorious minutes he is not
A function, a shop-soiled proletarian
Of no repute.  Beyond the landlord’s window,
Beyond the power lines and the ***-holed street,
He searches dawn’s horizons with wary eyes
For wild and wily Tartars, horsemen out
To blood the caravans for glory and gold.
A youth greets the day as he truly is:
A cavalryman, a soldier of the Czar,
Whose uniform is stained with victory.

A couple sat embraced in the corner of the subway at 2 am,
They huddled together in their winter jackets,
Riding around to escape the bitter cold.
She had her legs in his lap and she leaned into him as if whispering a secret,
Her head was against his collarbone as she listened for agreement but was met with the steady hum of the lights overhead.
The moment was intimacy
So much so that it led to the question of how they had gotten to the point of being so intimate
On public transportation
And I felt as though it was something I had been interrupting.
But three stops later and they were off into the night at Grand Central Station.
I saw them again in late May
But now they stuck to just holding hands,
She rested her head in the same spot as last time though,
And they weren’t embracing, but the intimacy was present in the stifled giggles and stolen glances.
And forever was more than a promise,
It was a reality.