New Year's Eve
The city swells with its own deafening noise
Traffic holds the world hostage.
It’s half past six in the evening.
Australia and New Zealand have already welcomed
The New Year.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge has burnt down and
Rebuilt itself from the blaze of raining fireworks —
A deluge of fire.
Nothing is new to them anymore
What is wasted is gone, tossed away with
Empty champagne bottles, broken, shattered,
Flung and scattered.
The Aussies have seen it all with the eyes of the fading sun,
One part eastern, the other western.
It has once been salubrious here before this haziness
I so much detest.
December has run its course.
So has the old year.
And with all its failures, private and otherwise.
The smell of flying perfumes and scheming
Alcohol hits the lungs.
Lipsticks, blood-red and sticky — smelly, even —smear the thin
Line of the horizon with the tattoo of wretchedness.
Life is a theatre. The city its proscenium.
People fill the earth and mill around confusedly,
Like fallen stars from a congested heaven, from obstreperous skies.
I hear foul language cursing the old year,
Blaming its wizened calendar for all the woes of man
And his patented debauchery.
Losers will always whine.
Trust them.
Strobes from fireworks harass the city,
Rocketing stridently above shallow craters and crested earth,
An assembled void of Stone Age —
Passing by night and by day over everything
And over houses of Salvation and the
Cordless tents of Rahab.
From between my dazed brain and tingling ears,
I suppose I hear a toll from the hilly church’s bell,
Half hidden by taller towers with shooting spikes among a
Jungle of high, narrow buildings, all peeking from the
Slow-rolling, floating wools of fuming winter clouds.
On my way to the place of the bell (I had nowhere
Else to slink to), I relish the sound and the
Awakening, I behold apparitions, pick up the voice of a
Sacrosanct orchestra and the muted cackle of laughing
Merrymakers —agents of the city and the suburbs, men
And women, waiting patiently for the city clock and church bells
To strike TWELVE at the same time, (like they do every
Thirty-first December,
In their conspiracy to topple the old year and inaugurate the
In-coming one),
So they can bury one and all in drunken shouts of Happy New Yearrrr!!
Mind you, Christmas carols have rolled back into the year’s archives.
Santa Claus has schlepped back to his royal castle in the skies,
Having bidden the children ‘Merry Christmas!’
His grey forest of a beard and round glasses revisit with the
Passage of eons in the eyes of foetuses.
How time crawls!
Everything is now old and reversed.
Soirées have bent their knees in deference to the passing of the
Old season, sealed and laid, perfumed richly, accompanied by
Protesting shadows.
We crave a brand new year —in the same manner darkness of night
Yearns to exchange shifts with the slow-cracking dawn, fresh and young.
We need a new party,
Even if we are to dance ourselves lame under the unfamiliar rhythm of
Unknown times.
The staccato brings us peace.
We welcome a renaissance.
Give it to us and hide the Blues.
We don’t mind.
Can I predict the nature of the sound of the expected midnight bell?
Will it ring or will it toll?
Will ringing segue into tolling, or the other way round?
Whichever!
What will be has already been.
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