[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Matt—
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A thought on the bitterness lines: how about something like:
The words don't pass the checkpoint of my tongue,
but bitterness sits heavy in my throat:
"checkpoint" because the tongue is guarded. And I'm suggesting "sits" over "lies" because of the internal rhyme with "bitt(erness)". We still know the words are unsaid. —Matt Q.
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Your suggestion has the virtue of bringing the personification of the tongue into sharp focus. I’m not sure I want to make it a main focus, though.

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On the title. Does it need the word "counting"? Maybe just "Another orbit of the sun"? I'd say the poem shows us that he's counting, and how. —Matt Q.
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This is a really good idea. I think I was trying to be too clever by having a title in IP. It could easily be confused as the first line of an untitled 15-line poem, and its length makes it seem like an oversized crown on the head of a dwarfish king. Roger, I chose the cliché deliberately to establish the speakers’s weary, jaded mood.
I’m keeping “lies” instead of “sits” to preserve the double meaning of “lies,” which plays off the double meaning of “spirits” and the ambiguity of verb tense in “let.” I want that thread of irony to stay.

One point that no one seems to have considered is whether the party actually happened, or is merely part of a remembered reverie from which the speaker awakes in S4L1. Several of you noted that the “came” in the opening line suggests a time in the more remote past. Has his celebration come again, or just the recollection of previous celebrations? At the end, I wanted the enjambed “when gone” in S4L1 to signal an awakening to reality, and to act as a kind of “Poof!” as he returns to his lonely existence. In that reading, the “fading spirits” refer less to the speaker’s falling mood and perhaps more to the ghosts of his dead friends, alluded to in the “fewer friends each year” in S3L1.