/ MMVII

True love, like Christmas in Australia, is just like you imagined, only hotter.

This house is like an atmosphere-less moon too close to the Kuiper Belt, and if you listen closely, you can hear the pelting of tiny objects, like nosy, drunken neighbors back in that esoteric time when everyone seemed to run out of sugar, and, of course, pretenses. My, aren't you sweet! Oh, little velveteen bird crashing into my window, I know you're real! Much as Christmas in Australia or true love is real, just not in the way you imagined, and only now, too late have you inspired me to listen to O Holy Night and What Child is This, absent of faith, if not sentiment. Days late.

The second smallest bird in North America is dubbed Kinglet, as if somehow I am running on a borrowed soul, because I see what you did there. Sometimes I look in the mirror and because New Year's is as much about reflection as resolution, I say, 'Like a fine wine, my friend. A fine wine.'

I am getting more expensive with age. I am my own sense of inflation. Good lord, show me the way. (Skips in other direction).

Oh, occasionally you fill in more details, you add snow to the sky when the little bird flies away, you imagine the tiny fingers petting her head gentler, warmer, their eyes gleaming and wonder great, you add an extra night to the holiday because no one can give you a failing grade at your own final exam, and when those witnesses say, 'That never happened!' you can just as easily answer, 'Like you ever lived in my head.' At this very moment I am smoking a clove and skipping tonka beans across the river and hailing a taxi and bringing 1,000 young people to tears and laughter alike. I am at the door promising never again while imagining one more time. It is over, completely over, and it is full of promise and it is new. It is the beg in the beginning and the ugh when it is through.

I see what you did there, little bird. Fly away, if you must. I took your picture.