We have to settle this. You've been
silent and melancholy for too long,
sitting by the window watching clusters
of snowflakes spin dizzily into the glass,
immune to the acts I have committed to make
this holiday into something worth remembering.
Be aware that I've got a roasted turkey
that I can leave in your bed as a warning,
I will pull the hair off your chest to
put fur on the macaroni reindeer I made this morning,
and if you look in the box over there
that says "Holidays," there's a string of happily
blinking, multicolored lights with your name on them.
The last should be the best, the showstopper,
as there's no more after this year.
I'm doing this because of the Christmas Eve
when my mother had told us that we
couldn't be here, that we could go anywhere
that night, but just not here, and my brother
and I ended up at the video arcade in
a bowling alley halfway across town
with the other high school kids that had been
displaced, and because of the one year
Dad was ready to cancel everything, his empty pockets
worn too thin over his idea of what Christmas should be,
and because of last year, when I was like
a Dickens creation, watching the festivities
of some other family, and had the evening drawn
to a close amidst cries of oh no and the oscillations
of ambulance lights when my stepfather's stepfather's blood
spread over the tile where he had fallen.
This year, our joy is imperative. This year is the last
time I'm celebrating, and I intend to have you
screaming Feliz Navidad and blitzkrieging carols
until the cops show up to shut us down. In the fimbulwinter
following, the new holidays can interrupt, the ones we make
ourselves that let me shove you down into the dirt or the snow
and keep you there with a grasp or with candlewax.
Some ribbon, a bottle rocket or a te amo le mas.
©2002 jms