Without the Trimmings

This Christmas I shed all my flimsy trimmings.

With eyes involuntarily brimming and

in a transparent pantomime I tried

to pretend I’d not been caught out this time.

I didn’t intend to fall short and had been looking forward to it.

I would sprint toward it and feel like

this wasn’t such a show,

that I wasn’t just dragging myself through like a year ago.

Apparently though, the dormant thing

was not dormant at all.

I erupted then froze and then

fire and then gall and then a brawl.

The blanket-pall that

shrouds what’s left of a heart and

cloaks it in frost means that

Christmas is another luxury lost to me now.

Tears sprang like a leak and I tried to sneak off like a thief;

ashamed to show my face to the underneath;

titbits of melodies beneath, words I remember

singing when I was young sounded now

like Sanskrit tongues, extinct and far-flung.

When I was young, I’d be down there. I’d have done my hair

been involved. Left a trace. Not now.

I didn’t know my place within these walls.

When I walked down the stairs,

descending and half-whimpering

to Shane and Kirsty McColl,

I didn’t feel a home in theirs, at all.

I smeared on lipstick in the bathroom like a gurn,

hoping the war-paint would turn me into

something more strong. I wanted to sing along, be part of the

party. Eat some hearty food, play charades,

get a little tipsy, watch trash TV. But the real

charade in the house was me

And it was was wearing thin.

Don’t be a victim. You’re ruining this. Stop crying.

Do what we’re doing.

Who cares if we’re lying? It’s just a game.

Forget to remember that things will never be the same.

So I put on that show. I stopped crying and I held my burning tongue.

But like when we were young, that wasn’t quite enough.

At the knock on the door and in puff of smoke,

Christmas had disappeared

and just as I’d feared the one who pulled the most tragic joke

out of the cracker is the horse everyone is willing to back.

Homeless but home; party hat on, slumped on a gilded throne,

friend to no one but never alone.

Just as I remember but can never get back

the way my mother really smelled,

this Christmas was a fir tree, majestic once

but hacked and long-felled.

Riddled with rot and nearly dissolved,

we tried but there are some problems

that will never be solved with a holiday by rote.

This little boat will never reach an even keel

and some fractures cannot be commanded to heal;

I won’t be told to unfeel what aches in my chest.  

Some volcanoes will erupt after months of resting

and some bonds will not withstand the testing.