Troy-Albany Trance-Formations

Happy Christmas Poem (Rather long but … December 3, 2008

I think it’s funny.)

“Happy Christmas Poem” by Frostwolf T’Firerose  (from about 8 years back, but it’s mostly timely.)

December hides blood and envy
in its seemingly benign decorations
Sharp crystalline shards slice out
in every direction – beware
the sweet snowflakes, they’ll cut you!

Reindeer and Santa, serial killers
of untold millions.  The 12 Days of Christmas
collect a cavalcade of carnage, in geometric
progression.  (Those ten lords a-leapin’
careen desperately to avoid the gunfire.)

The Tannenbaum Taliban—
firetraps in the slow-making—
leave their loose spiky tresses
on the hardwood floors, waiting
for Osama dryness to turn tinder tricks.

“Death-ember” might be a better word
for the last month of the year.
Bridging the Sagicorn transition
Winter Solstices were blood sacrifices
times past.  Druids died for the future.

It’s a time for entrails, Month 12.
Be it sausages and stuffing or necromancy
the somber funerals of red and green
wakes and the egg-nog and rum flavor
celebrate its layoffs and suicides.

Yes, it’s a regimented cheeriness
The music even belies the schizophrenia.
“Joy to the World” and “O Come Immanuel”
“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”
and the blood-drenched “Carol of the Bells.”

Omens abound, this Stepfordized forcefed fiesta
from the ad firm Avarice, Depression and Muerte.
The competition is oh-so-fierce, religions
Vying for the title “Most-Holy Addiction”, creating
Christian-Jewish-Muslim-Secular Battlefields along the way.

It’s a time to compare booty and loot and despair at being wanting.
It’s a time for resolving to do better, schmoes on the flip side.
It’s a time to argue over ribbons and bows, kiddle-kids.
It’s a time to lose oneself in the holiday melee.
(Courtesy of Milton Bradley and Absolut.)

We can’t get away from the mayhem.
It’s everywhere about, a Sega-Nintendo war,
carried out in Board Rooms and Toy Stores
directed by a hidden malevolent psyche—
Ignore the corporate shill in the Santa Suit!

No, a Hallmark façade can’t cover the debris.
The spike in self-murder arises
while the outdoor temperature inversely concurs.
The pressure inside and out gains steam
until the orgasmic rage explodes.

The Saturnalia of ancient times is preferable
that lustful orgy of sex, feasting and desires
unleashed and sated.  The time deserves an antidote
today to Adolf’s Aryan-dear games (business
mergers, acquisitions and general shitting).

Instead, we have the holly and the ivy
racing with each other to claim which makes
the better nooses to choke with.
Mistletoe, that joyous clump, lies in wait for you
its luscious fruit only too happy to kill.

The records spin, and the emparkaed parents
drive themselves to drivel and gravel
looking for that specious toy every kid must have.
The striving to stay secure in a middle-class
paradise (that never was) has begummed our short hairs!

All we want is to be loved; those shimmering packages
we set under the trees labeled “To Laura, from George,”
symbolize our capacity and our emptiness.
Each year we climb over each other to overcome
the beliefs that we are merely overgrown worms.

The luckiest among us treat Deathember like any other.
Just winter days fraught with their own perils.
For my part, I let the mystical air wash
over me on the year’s shortest day.
A natural miracle that comes but once every 365.

I struggle to negotiate shopper-littered streets
the hustle-razzle-dazzle not much my speed.
Though I long to have a special someone
for whom I wish to get that lovely gift
(and put through the same misery in return).

Is it a secret blessing to be single for the Holidays?
The choices I can make, all up to me alone.
Ah, but then I have found on my own the benefit
of accepting where I sit in this trademarked world,
I who have no brand to call my home.

Yes, the sadness of the time passing, the gifts
that won’t be delivered course through my blood
and the green focus is sometimes my own
wondering about me, my self-centered regard.
All I can do is write a poem or two to mark the wounds.

I think this jaundice of mine can help heal you—
the yellow-smoke taste of real observation
serves as a reminder that what you see is true.
It really is as bad as it seems.
(Isn’t it just the vision of registered loveliness?)

To some this might seem the rankest of presents.
I know some would rather look past the reality,
the wool on their bodies keeps them in baaing content.
But here you are, with me in this moment.
Say it with me loud and clear:  “Christmas Sucks!”

Shout it from the rooftops and the promontories!
Let a glad bitterness cleanse the world of despair!
The tintinnabulation of the beleaguered and the belabored.
We are all in this gruesomeness together.
Let us belch a discontented sigh in unison.

For the satisfaction in feeling what is in front of me,
that is what I have to share with you.
This whimsical amphigory has eructed forth
into this wistful existence, from inside the longing installed
long ago under artificial snow stuck on plastic tines.

I became the urban planner for the community of packages
sitting below Christmas Tree Mountain,
I wished for a world of love and gingerbread,
of games and laughing under the wild moonlight.
While my dad drank his nights into oblivion.

The traumas scarred my etheric body,
and I struggle to understand compassion.
But it doesn’t arise from the fantasies I wished for.
It rests with my feet as I walk through dead leaves
on cold, hard ground frosted with winter.

The growth of day begins on the shortest day, after all.
And thankfully it precedes that 25^th mark of the month.
I offer you that restful thought to combat
against the relentless of the time.  Take warmth
and comfort in knowing it really is that bad.