Alone.
The telephone
crouched, not waiting to ring.
Feeling the still air. Listening
to A Pagan Day. The catastrophic
wave a full year old. No words, no apostrophic
hymn, no song. No singer. The eddies of the Waccamaw
like the thick flow of time, like resistance, a design flaw.
The day feeling short. In the Hubble's distant stare,
the pale light of new galaxies' faint glare.
A dead Sri Lankan's orphaned son
with eyes as blank as stone.
Like everyone,
alone.

__

A little over a year ago, I had the mentally unbalanced idea of creating a sonnet form that would work syllabically, beginning with a line of two syllables and growing by increments of two in each subsequent line up to the eighth, which would (like the seventh) contain fourteen syllables, and then the lines would shrink by increments of two syllables so that the final line, like the first, would contain two. Also, the poem would rhyme in couplets. As I said, "mentally unbalanced." "December 25, 2005" is the fifth poem I have written in this form, which a good friend has suggested I christen the "Albergonnet."

Not that it matters to the poem, but I actually did spend December 25, 2005 alone in my apartment, listening to Psychic TV's A Pagan Day, watching anniversary commemorations of the Asian tsunami on CNN, and tinkering with poems.