These were the first two poems I wrote in 2008. I almost gave them each their own post, but there’s a striking similarity between the two. The first one is about new year’s.

Did you kiss me at midnight
because you wanted to kiss me,
or because you wanted to start the year
on something positive?
Or does the question even matter?
If it was only the moment,
can I not recreate the moment?
Did I not give you
something positive to start the year on?

There is, I think,
a fundamental difference between you and I:
while I labor over meaning and motive,
you just act.
This is why, when looking back,
you kissed me at new year’s,
and I’m still worrying about it.

Again, I’m not sure if I had someone in mind when I wrote this, though I do know that if I did, we did not kiss at new year’s. I think I was working on New Year’s Eve. We had tacos.

This is the second one:

Mostly, I hoped that
everything would be okay.
That was two years ago.
I really thought it would,
like wishing had power–
not wishing
on childhood superstitions
(though I did that, too)
but simple hope.

I’d styled myself a realist,
which is a pessimist in denial,
but she drove that all away.
I smiled, laughed, dreamed,
hoped,
but the worst thing was
I believed it.

There’s a difference
between hope and hope:
the trick
is not to confuse the two.

This one is pretty disjointed, but it has some good lines. I like that I used the same device to end both of these poems. (I’m also really fond of starting them with questions, especially “Did you/did your” questions.) Normally this wouldn’t merit attention, but they were also right next to each other.