Loy Krathong

(Thai for "new beginning,"
as in new beginning festival)
 

"Loy Krathong"
 

Melancholy's flame
 consumes our leavings
 as time consumes
 dead branches of our lives
 
The pine-needles of yester-year
 age to stenciled pen-knives
 as we reach myopic senility
 younger or older
 richer or poorer
 meeker or bolder
 
anarchists and orthodontists
all fall into middle-life crisis:
 frigid admissions of fragility
epiphanies of relative islandization...
 "the proud man's contumely and
 the pangs of disprized love"
 
and we must face them now today
 as seen through reason
 not as fatherly sent from above
 but as miserly rented to us...
 our hands fitted to the glove
 the breadth of our spirits and choices
 hackled to pass through
 the variable-calculated factory
 of insincere pseudo-scientific conversation
 
yes, better the bomb:
 to die with applause and aplomb
 than to plaud cattled through another lie-clad
 icono-clastic carpeted hall-way
 grown waspish with P.H.D. littered ants
 twitching their black-souled mandibles
over each other's coffee-cups

yet that mind-bending decision,
 that coil-snapping incision
 is often best not made at all...
 but left to the prophets
 as our lives turn to profit:
 Yes, what honor is hemlock
 drunk alone?

 After all:
who are we kidding?
 We're all Horatios here:
 geological kiddlings
 most luckily kindling
for the next passing star