Annual Report (for Doug Lang)

• I hate this entire year, the way it stops
• and starts, dries you out, soaks you, lulls you
• to sleep, then wakes you up in a cold sweat.
• Not to mention the pills that are required
• just to get through it. I’m on Tylenol
• with codeine at this very moment.

• It sees to it that the bills keep coming,
• marked by obvious deceit. The dentist we despise
• who keeps overcharging us, for example.
• It is so objectionable, so unfair.
• Where are the free lunches of yesteryear,
• the Martinis, Manhattans, highballs
• on the hotel terrace overlooking the magic
• domes of the glittering city?

• It was not like this in 1982, I can tell you that.
• 1982 let you smoke all the True Blues you wanted.
• It said, go ahead — have fun! Eat giant hamburgers,
• huge slices of cake, big platefuls of French fries.
• Fuck all night, sleep late, call in sick. It told you
• you had to listen to Van Morrison singing
• “Cypress Avenue” over and over, all night long
• till there was nothing left of it to inhale.

Terence Winch, originally from New York City, where he was closely associated with the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, now lives in the Washington, DC, area. The son of Irish immigrants, he is both a musician and writer. In addition to an American Book Award and the Columbia Book Award, Winch has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and grants from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Fund for Poetry. He is also the winner of a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. Winch has published five books of poems and two collections of short stories. His most recent music project is a CD that collects his best-known Irish compositions on one disc: When New York Was Irish: Songs & Tunes by Terence Winch. “Annual Report” is from his collection Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor, published earlier this year by Hanging Loose Press, and was originally published in the journal Conduit. It is reprinted by permission.