christmas can really hang you up the most

since my first wife and i split up, i've always hated holidays --
mostly spent 'em sitting by the phone waiting for my kids to call
which sometimes they did
it ain't that way anymore since i married my sweetie
but sometimes i still get in that mood anyway

last night we had dinner with my middle dtr, her fiance, and her niece
(who now lives with her daddy in arlington)
piper made me the best santa claus pic of all time
and her mama baked some of the best chocolate chip cookies i've ever tasted
we gave andre a bamboo plant and got some of his mom's famous pasta sauce

aimee showed me the trailer for stallone's new flick
(which i refuse to name or link to -- fuck that pornography of violence)
he wastes a bunch of dudes who look like the asian media crew
in the goriest and most graphic ways imaginable
(i'm the guy who couldn't believe it

when my kids watched american werewolf in london
and 30 people bought it in like the first minute
also thought it was bullshit when ppl i knew laughed and thought it "ironic"
when travolta and jackson blew that dude's brains out by accident in the car
in pulp fiction)

maybe sly's trying to make a political statement -- turn his character
into a monster (like, um, america?); maybe his flick is like predator
told from the perspective of the title character -- but i doubt it
(the auteur, of course having sat out his own opportunity
to be a real-life action hero in college, in _switzerland_)

when i got married the first time, in noo yawk,
my future ex-wife actually saw stallone in macy's
standing around, waiting for somebody to recognize him
"and he was about _this_ tall," she said,
holding her hand up at about shoulder height to her

anyway i've been remembering christmases from the past, two in particular:
one the year i dropped out of school and was closing my store on christmas eve
when i walked outside to see my town blanketed in newly fallen snow
i remember looking up into the streetlight and watching the snowflakes swirling
so pretty

the other is the last christmas before i left new york for good
i'd been out late drinking and went to sleep with my foot on the floor
to keep the room from spinning; at five a.m., my parents
burst into my room and were jumping up and down on my bed, yelling
"wake up, it's christmas!" -- payback is a mofo

they always _could_ be willfully perverse;
lately his nutritional status has been a concern
and she gave us a scare last week when she was missing for 21 hours
coming home from the bank via philadelphia, asbury park,
the george washington bridge and the delaware water gap

at first she was lost, but after awhile i think she started to dig
the thelma and louise aspect of it
(after all, as my sweetie sez, this is the girl who left hawaii by herself
at age 27 to travel around the world, back in 1952
when _nobody_ did that)

i'm going to go spend some time with them next month
and my mother might get to come spend some time with us after that
i've been humming opera arias at work and thinking about how
my recent interest in classical music (and indeed, my life-long search for
the loudest and most emotionally cathartic sounds --

from the who 'n' hendrix to the five 'n' stooges
right up to the japanoise i'm investigating today)
might be a reflection of his love for the bombast of strauss 'n' wagner
and, in a weird way, the way i'm going to keep him alive in my memory
when he's no longer around