Can you feel the loss?

What is a year to you when
 you have seen so many?
Today they all rise, raise their hands
 and shout and cheer, "This year was the best".
Didn't they say the exact thing last year too?
You can barely separate one year from another,
 They all seem to occur all at once,
 As though time has stretched and bent
 and collapsed altogether, Just today
 while throwing the ball at a four year old child
You suddenly remembered how you had come up
with one excuse after another in order
not to get up at 5 in the morning
to go for march past practices;
You wish you had gone instead
 But that was four years ago
 Not this year that is ending
You wish you had told them you didn't eat the chocolate,
 Just thrown it away because
Because you were six years old
You wish you were better at being yourself
You wish you had said a few more things to people
 You wish you hadn't stopped yourself
 Because you didn't want to open old wounds

You wish, more than anything, that you had written more

 Instead of  stupidly violently hurting

On your own

Can you feel the loss?

Heartburns

Do you remember that time of the year
When K. spent days sitting by the window,
smoking more than he could bear,
 filtering in and out of love
And S. was not keeping well,
 lying in the sofa, deep within the blankets,
reading her Greek tragedies,
 morose and moody and dark
A. kept arranging the flowers,
or plucking them or whatever it was
 she was doing with those flowers,
I just remember them all over the place.
I kept waiting you know,
kept waiting for you to call
I was so easily distressed,
so prone to bouts of despair
When you had something else to do
Perfectly valid I knew but even then
there were those heartbreaks I suffered from
Silently painfully
I could envision not having someone to come to
 at the end of the day and that made me dreadfully sad
even though I knew full well I was too young
and mustn't worry about things like that,
like my mother would say
 I don't know what it is that you did to me
 and how my heart tore in a way I couldn't bear.
 But those December heartburns,
 how it drove us all quite mad.