what a week this year has been

I go through weeks like I do sheets of paper, or hair ties, or poems.

I use them all up but I can't remember what i wrote.

Years are like that too. Someone asks what i did last Monday

and I stare at them like they're interested

in my goings-about the first weekend of last January

which I guess was this January and I still have no idea.

I have a paper calendar purely so I can read it back

to myself on New Year's Eve and recall everything that happened

in the past twelve months, which felt

like twelve hours and twelve days and possibly twelve years

at once and I need to read my twelve-month-old Sharpie

to remember it all.

And the first day of the new year always feels so anticlimactic as well,

like I've been saving up my memory storage for a day

that dawns gray and cold over the horizon of the past one -

familiar and not worth it. So no, 

I don't remember what I did last New Year's,

and don't ask me what classes I went to on Wednesday. This year 

was one week long but it was twelve months and another Monday

is just around the corner. Stupid cyclical nature of the world.

Stupid endlessness. The new year begins on a Thursday, 

the end and beginning

of yet another week in our lives except maybe for Australia,

they've got a head start on remembering it. Take

my picture on January 1st and show it to me 365 sunsets from now.

Ask if I remember what a week this year has been.