Autumn

Your living room couch
a blank hole.

Your affectless grin 
in the face of televised chatter.

Your bedeviled yard, filthy from
socialization you didn’t attend.

Half the community mourning
the departure of the sun,

half ecstatic in full plastic ghost worship
under the moon.

Your slow blinking apprehension
when you turn away from

this season of cooling and
finale; if ever there will be

rebirth, it seems mythically far off now,
a prophecy like any other:

affirmed only in retrospect,
long after you miss your chance

to prepare for it
and reap its joy when it comes.

You tell yourself there’s so much to do
before the snow, all those things

to be picked up and stowed 
before the first snow, before

the first snow. But
the living room couch is

a blank hole and there’s so much
chatter it’s hard to even think.

Instead you sit with the prophecies,
eyes shut tight, affectless grin in place.