Too Happy

by Luke Bloomfield

We’ve buried our sadness
and all the spades of therapy
can’t dig it up.
In public it’s embarrassing
people trying to hide
their mild feelings.
Looks like we missed out
on misery this year
we say in line
at the sandwich shop
while clinging to despair
but despairingly feeling it slip away 
like a terrified frog
with its panicky little heart
puckering its sides
while it wriggles out
from our child’s grip
and jettisons itself
all crazy legged into the weeds.
People just aren’t depressed
the way they used to be.
Deprived of melancholy
there’s a sadness to that.
We all feel it, that longing
for something worse.
The therapists are taking it extra hard
going to work like
weary travelers coming home
to a desolated empire
dragging themselves up the cracked
and ruined stone steps
to the crumbled ziggurat
of their former greatness.
We try not to look at them
muttering their medleys
of incantation
around their measly fires
while we mournfully
feast on bulls by the hundreds
and lap up lakes of wine.