Christmas

The sounds of laughter and love drift up from the floor below,
emanating through the floorboards and flowing up the stairs,
where they find me, sitting alone in a room we called my home,
wondering how it was so quickly that yesterday became today.

As Christmas, it's important to recognize the key and critical,
shed the trappings of those things considered mostly irrelevant,
but on this holiday I'm having a hard time concerning myself with
tradition, seeing as how it seems to have entirely failed me this time.

Maybe it would be best to wander down to the sounds, engage maybe
in laughter and love, even if for only the face value: I fear that today
I've sadly little to gain from such things, beings of family being little
comfort, their goodwill sadly contorted into anger, hate and loathing.

Welcome to Christmas, I said, as my brother cheerfully handed her
the present he was so proud of: tickets! to see Wicked, of all things,
except unlike when I played that card, it's in New York City, appropriately
east to my version of west, and maybe just maybe it won't provide images

that will later kill you.