The Year That Never Was

It was the year that never was…
2020 strung out in a long series of days,
Weeks and months embedded
In a fabric of limbo.

The better part of 9 months waiting to exhale…
And for those less fortunate, waiting to inhale.
9 months of entreaties to embrace the new normal,
9 months of coping daily with the supranormal.

The new normal? Normality? Formality? Banality?
Brutality of reality subverted by alternative fact.
We humans, species hellbent on our own demise,
Rush to evolve a deformed genus to despise.

Time for a reboot! Rethink the book of life,
Constrain to dung heaps tried and true conformity,
Long since morphed to a state of true deformity.
Yes, time to reboot, time to jump, time to shout!

Reboot the simian mind, reboot humankind!
Find the brain in humanity’s proverbial booty.
Reboot the booty, reboot the booty!
Toot the horns, find a diverse scheme of continuity.

Shake, shake, shake…shake, shake, shake…
Shake the reboot, shake the reboot!
Find the ritual for a new species,
Enough of the familiar feces!

The year that never was is no more.
The year that was is prologue past,
A dismal bore. Shake the new normal,
Time to ditch the gormless corbel.

Coming out of the fog, let’s shake chronic nausea!
Let’s untie the knot in our collective abdomen!
Let fade the three-headed cynic and misanthrope!
Abandon the Trojan Horse radioisotope!

Enough, enough, enough with the tired logorrhea,
Invective and hate spewed from halls of honor.
Unleash the torrent of stymied longing,
The little death, portal to the new we, the diorama.

Almost there…almost there—humanity’s adolescence ends with
Mutant strains that reject out-of-hand the plenary,
Young adulthood that embraces the fledgling seed,
That knows how to laugh, for which love is not supplanted by greed.

Shake the reboot! Shake the reboot! Learn again to see!
The year that never was yields to new year yet to be,
Humanity’s not a lost cause, it’s reinventing its legs.
This is the waking dream…if we want it.

—Robert Hieger
January 29, 2021