The year in this poem doesn't go out with fireworks. It goes out as a string of failures, and we don't learn what they are failures of until the last line. Dave Bonta builds nine lines from two trailing comparisons, "like a counterfeit head" and "like a devil", and holds back the thing being compared until "so ends the old year." Until then the reader carries a handful of images with nothing to attach them to, like loose change waiting for a pocket.
What the images share is lost power. A head that blesses no one, a hand "all out of hands", a devil "who cannot touch", a "god of poverty": each is a figure who should have some authority, whether to bless, give, tempt or rule, and each has been emptied. Even the devil, whose whole job is to do harm, is stuck. The old year, the poem suggests, doesn't end in a grand reckoning. It runs out of strength. The word "counterfeit" points at coins, since a head is the face stamped on money, and so the blessing is as worthless as forged currency. That hint grows into a small pattern of cheap or scarce things: "poverty", "spare", "tin".
"A hand all out of hands" is the strangest phrase, and it stays open. Because the poem ends on "ticking", we may hear the hands of a clock, with time used up. We may also hear a begging hand, an empty hand of cards, or the idiom "out of hand". The poem doesn't choose. The title, "Fast away", pulls two ways as well. It can mean quickly gone, but "fast" also means fixed in place, which suits the devil who cannot touch. It may also recall fasting, which suits all the spareness that follows. These are readings the words allow rather than things the poem states.
The construction is simple and strict. There are three tercets, short lines, no rhyme, and no punctuation at all, so "like" and "or" do all the joining and the lines slide into one another. The first two stanzas share a shape. Each opens with "like a…", puts a negation in the middle ("blessing no one", "who cannot touch"), and offers an alternative with "or". That "or" makes the speaker sound as if they are groping for the right comparison and not quite finding it. Every attempt is a little wrong, and the wrongness is the point.
Then the pattern breaks. The third stanza drops the similes and simply names things: "spare measle / ticking tin". Here the poem stops comparing and points at what is left. "Spare" can mean sparse, left over, or even merciful, as in "to spare someone". "Measle" is the singular of a word we usually meet only as "measles", so it becomes a single spot, one blemish. The sound of "ticking tin" matches what it says. The tight t, k and n sounds make a small metallic click in the mouth, like a cooling can or a cheap clock.
The last line is the only one that feels like a complete, steady sentence. "So ends the old year" is plain and almost proverbial, and after the odd, fragmentary pictures it lands like a shrug. The "so" doesn't claim that the images caused the ending. It says that the year ends in just this manner, in thin, cheap and slightly diseased pieces. Nothing in the text tells us when or where it was written, and it doesn't need that. Everything it asks of us is on the page.
The poem matters because it deflates a occasion that is usually inflated. Most writing about the turn of the year offers resolutions, nostalgia or celebration. This poem offers a pile of defunct authorities and a bit of tin, and yet it isn't self-pitying. There is dry humor in a devil who can't touch anything and a god whose only domain is poverty. It also shows students two techniques worth noticing: delaying the subject so that the final line rearranges everything before it, and creating mood by subtraction, taking away blessing, touch, hands and wealth until only a faint ticking remains.