poem

Sleigh

There’s an empty sleigh in our front yard

No fake presents stacked in back

No reindeer team harnessed to the front

We never got around to decking it out.

So it sits out there as film school metaphor

For the hollowed-out decadence

American Christmas has become.

Even morons are insulted 

By the heavy-handedness of it all,

Rage honking their horns as they drive by.

One night I tried to sit in it, a little drunk,

Fell over and broke it.

Laying there in the snow, in my underwear,

Pin-nippled, ball-shriveled,

I epiphanied a vision of meaning

While the stars swarmed above me

Like a buckshot black screen. 

Since that night we decided to tell

Some people the empty sleigh represents

A void we’ve all given up trying to fill

And others it’s there to symbolize

The one person we all notice is missing

Just when the rest of the world insists

We ought to be most happy and joyous.

I hope you don’t ever get what you want

Most things are conjured myths

Quick to melt in your flushed hands.

I tell her it means nothing, really.

She whispers, in my ear, an answer

We now tell ourselves

If either of us asks.

I had never thought of it that way.

Wouldn’t you like to know?