New Years Morning 2020 by Joey Copsey

I wrote this poem just after the stroke of midnight this last new years eve. I was at a bar in LA in union station which is a gorgeous art deco, ol timey building. It was the perfect place and moment to reflect on the passage of time. I’ve never been able to just have a good time on NYE. It’s such a unique moment in our culture. The only moment we all take to pause and recognize the present, reflect on the past and hope for the future. It’s heavy, which is why we’re usually drunk when it happens. You don’t want to dwell too long on that while sober.

So I was thinking these thoughts while marking the end of my 2nd decade as an adult when I wrote this. I sent it to a number of friends from college who I knew were all doing the same. A few of them messaged me after the quarantine began, asking, “Is this what you meant by not quite unknowable terrors?” I didn’t know what to reply, my hubris is getting shaky.

New Years Morning 2020

They came for us in the twenty-teens
Our insecurities,
Our buried tumultuous memories,
Our fears,

our worries,
Our own minds,
Our uninhabited desires,
Our impending forties.

Those of us who survived
Look now to a new horizon
A new decade
Filled with it’s own perils
Its unseen but not quite unknowable terrors.

Somehow I feel more prepared,
Like a survivor of the tempest
Calmly awaiting the next storm
Knowing that it’s no longer a mystery.
Terrified of the opaque danger
Invigorated by the subtle promise
Of more years
Years in which to be.

Let them come I say,
In hubris maybe.
I’m ready.