the special seasons giving reasons to be stressed,dressed to the nines, attempts to find the perfect gifts
no one will know I hunted far & wide, and high & low to buy.
So why the hassle and the bother just to make the merchants money?
Send the cards because a certain square there on the calendar
is marked in red? Instead, I'd like to NOT,
and opt for just the two of us to spend the hours in bed or
snuggled on a comfy couch before a roaring fire. Desire,
the gift that we exchange. And that, my love, costs nothing
and means more to me than all the tinseled packages placed
carefully beneath the artificial tree that is a metaphor of sorts:
no pine-y scent enchanting me to childhood,
no fun-filled trips into the woods to chop it down.
A lie, is what it is, a falsehood of a balsam symbol for
sweet families and memories that used to loom so large, I thought,
but were important mostly to the ghost of who I thought I was.
A Dickensian ghost, not of a Christmas past or present, nor
a Christmas still to come, but what I thought that it should be,
the empty dream that overtook the visions of St. Nick and sugar plums.
"Reality's for those who cannot handle drugs," they say.
The way you laugh and kiss me gently on the neck, perfection
that will never be a holiday for anyone but me, and more,
the origin of "holiday" itself,
a day, a look, a touch
that's holy,
holy,
holy.
(c) Ellen Gillette, 2017 - My writers group assignment for tonight's meeting was to write about holidays. I was almost not going, but started this poem. The ladies asked me to post it. Like I told them, I'm not sure what it means, or why it started so dark, but sometimes you write the poem, sometimes it writes itself. No need to overthink.
