Annette Funicelo is Cast in Your New Year’s Poem

The bar of each year of your life is set like a game of Limbo

to wriggle or shimmy under, or just barely slip through that period

of the film where what you sought was not what you got.

You didn’t plan for the letter you sent to be returned to sender,

the grain of your own handwriting on the envelope covered

in the high court of post office codes. You wanted to keep in touch.

This year you tried to reach out, connect, bend toward the light

backwards. Look at you! Trying! The revelers at your beach

didn’t get the file on the quiet you needed. They all danced,

played their ukuleles in the key of too loud.

You fell into their barbecue pit.

Well now, it’s time to walk on fire, match the accident

with an event of your own making, strike a note

of such volume the string vibrates its highest and resonates

for nothing but the greater good. You meant it, see? Springy

footsteps are the answer. Bounce the inflated ball into the air

but don’t expect to know where it will land since seals have a way

of popping their charmed noses up. You can’t decide on a deck

or a basement when it comes to levels for this year, but the cast

holds the rope anyway. You choose how to pass under it,

trip on a brick, sail through the air, land on a flowered towel

or in the surf. It’s all finesse, seeds of foam at the shore’s edge

as the audience gets a wink of a mermaid’s tail. Credits. Song.