My Favorite New Years Eve Poem

I vow to sleep through it
By Marge Piercy


I hate New Year’s Eve.
I remember the panic to have
something, anything to do,
some kind of date
animal, vegetable, mineral,
a giant walking carrot,
a boa constrictor, a ferret,
an orangutan, a lump of coal.


I remember ringing apartment
bells on 114th Street
looking for a rumored party.
Parties with lab punch:
Mogen David, grapefruit juice
and lab alcohol, hangovers
guaranteed to anyone within
ten yards of the foaming punchbowl.


I wake the next morning
with my mouth full of mouse
turds and wood ashes.
I wake and remember
how I tried to demonstrate
the hula, my hips banging
like a misloaded washer,
how I necked with a toad.


I remember limp parties,
parties askew, everyone
straggling home with the wrong
mate, the false match.
Evenings endless and boring
as a bowling tournament
at the senior center.
Is it midnight yet?


Only nine thirty? Only
nine thirty-eight? At midnight
we will spill drinks on
each other’s clothes, kiss
the boors and bores we detest,
the new year like a white
tablecloth on which a drink
has already been spilled.


                   Copyright, Middlemarsh, Inc. 2001
                   from Early Grrrl, The Early Poems of Marge Piercy
                   Leapfrog Press