The Holidays

 

 

 

 

 

Holiday Spirit

 

You remember the Christmas cartoons and the family, all of them, even distant cousins, together

Watching them just after Christmas dinner and a stale, uncomfortable joke or two 

 

You remember anxiously awaiting gift-opening time yet you dread having to fake a sunny smile

And pretend to be grateful about a slew of five-dollar gift cards and overgrown, pretentious sweaters

 

You begin to long for the safe, quiet solitude of your home, where it’s always dark and brooding, no fakers permitted.

 

Then, sitting alone in a dark room, with no family, no friends, no gifts and silly children beneath a well-lit, choking tree,

And certainly no god or Holy Above as far as you can see to believe, you begin to wonder a million black things per-minute

 

You begin to doubt whether any of those distant memories were ever really yours to muse, or simply some Divine joke,

Meant to groom you into a perfectly insane flower of madness and despair, full bloom.

 

You remember the warmth, the taste of the food, the laughs, and the faces they own, positive they’re all familiar to you

But then again, where was all of that now? Was it ever real, or was your imagination playing the fool, a ruse to delusion?

 

After all, your version of living ended a year or two ago, and the rest was a headstone, a graveside memory or so.

 

You wash it all down with a drink of warm whiskey, watered with age, and you like the taste of a familiar monsoon.

You slam the glass down on the battered, worn coffee table and light up a smoke  

 

Laughing a little, you remember that this used to be a no-smoking prison cell. Funny how time precedes change

 

You remember being dragged along to church for Christmas service, where you listen to the same old story

With a mild disdain for the ridiculous, unknown, or the as-yet-to-be proved. whatever it was,  you aren’t sure its you.

 

You aren’t sure if you call it a lack of Faith, or disdain for self-righteous institution and its ghouls

Its not that you refuse to believe, its that you refuse the oppression, the guilt trip, the rules.

 

Or maybe its none of that at all, and your just at a crossroads for the young, feeling as though you standing alone

though You’ve knelt at the cross, and laid prostrate at the heels of Prometheus and Both stared down Silent

 

yet you’re asked to sing Heavenly praises, lest your family take note and disapprove, or worse

 

So you sit alone in the dark, where there is no laughter, no joyous children and family togetherness

There is no one caring to watch you when you aren’t looking, judging, questioning, wondering, everything but letting.

 

Here, there are only the dead, and their eyes. At least you know what they seek, it’s the same as you, not to be confused.

You all sit and you stare into the madness projective of the empty house you call yours. Its been many others before.

 

The other dead sit just as silent and empty as you, each in their own cell, in this groaning, bloodthirsty house

Each has their story, telling of how they tripped and stumbled down, and found themselves jailed here to be consumed 

 

Each could tell of their own misspent time, their own lonely, lost, winter youths, with or without those hated cartoons

 

Though there is some understanding here, some common ground, you leave each other be, for everyone’s sanity

Or at least what miserably remains of those frailed, tattered strings

 

You all sit alone, with a bottle of whiskey, a few Marlboro reds, and distant memories of misspent Holidays,

Some for you, and some for me, all together, we bleed.x

Reviews

[Quill~]

Seems like a personal hell going on over the holidays.
At least you have a few to bleed with... to get through the despair.
An intense poem, well written.

[A.J.]

thank you very much.. it was an intense time... lol.

[Quill~]

:) this is done well...keep writing!

[SquinklaPsyOps]

From the following lines "You begin to doubt whether any of those distant memories were ever really yours to muse, or simply some Divine joke, Meant to groom you into a perfectly insane flower of madness and despair, full bloom." experiences as a child are initiated by what parents put in their children's mind.

This is my favorite part "The other dead sit just as silent and empty as you, each in their own cell, in this groaning, bloodthirsty house Each has their story, telling of how they tripped and stumbled down, and found themselves jailed here to be consumed " The reader is left to think the character in the story is reminism about its life as the character sits in prison smoking cigarettes with nothing else to do.

[A.J.]

"The reader is left to think the character in the story is reminism about its life as the character sits in prison smoking cigarettes with nothing else to do."

- thats exactly the feel of it. you read it perfectly. :)

[SquinklaPsyOps]

Ooh, my goodness, I really thought you were going to make fun of me, thank you. Will definitely read more of your awesome poetry style.

[A.J.]

thank u for ur compliment!