A Six-Pack of Christmas Sonnets
by John Kendall Hawkins
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Be Here Be Now Christmas
Since Black Friday I've had the blues for white Christmas.
Down here, down under, down in the bowels of this hell
Santas wear red shorts and deliver by surfboard;
they're fit as fiddles at Nero's arson sale. Word.
Not fat f*ck Yank gift-bearing trojan reindeer -- Tell --
who can't hold their liquor, run lights, can kiss my ass.
Obesity's fine. I don't mind. It's a duty
each year to spend debt slave dollars on the fools
who surround you each day. You push the envelope
to mobsters, pollies, and, at Mass, one for the Pope
watch for enforcer dogs, especially the drools.
And BTW Santa's helper's a real cutie.
One year Santa ran out of coal to gift bad ones;
the deer were on the Oxy, the elves packed stun guns.
A Turkey Christmas
Teaching English in Istanbul was so stressful
that à ¶Ã„Ÿretman who lived together got sh*t faced,
slept with each other in a moveable orgy
of Anglos, Aussies, lone Yanks and pretty, gorgy
Romanian girls, eager for the West, displaced
back home by Daddy's fall as a Bucharest tool.
I bought a rice-stuffed turkey on BaÄŸdat Caddesi
for Christmas, hailed a dolmuÃ...Ÿ home, and shared the bird,
and all the à ¶Ã„Ÿretman came to my flat and ate
with bonny seasonal smiles, and filled with hate
for me, the lone Yank, who was both shaken and stirred,
merry back-slapped by Empire, I, sad aggressee.
The Turks strongly prefer Anglo English to Yank,
and the Poms pretend Gallipoli was a prank.
The Intertextuality of Snow
There's a secret silent language in ice crystals
I long to understand. They hold the solution.
To Democracy's wide power and grand allure,
the broad sweep of powdery ones and manys -- sure,
each unique flake falls like scattered intuition
and compiles outside the fey windows of Mistral's
in back Vermont, where we old friends have come
to talk the talk of time, eat haughty cuisine -- O!
at this fine faux French-style eatery. Dave says,
Guys, we're lucky to be alive. Here and now pays.
A cute waitress takes our orders. We split Cioppino,
drink beaujolais. Mike eyes the waitress, What a bum.
I drift back to the flakes and wonder why I'm here,
a naked snowman among snowmen who'll disappear.
Johnny Six Shooter and the Xmas Tree
I don't really know what my mother was thinking,
strumming so soulfully on a stringless guitar,
in front of a silver tree without an angel star,
her three young boys packing heat. The photo's winking,
in a way that disturbs me now, Twilight Zone sh*t.
Like it could read the future and predict the path
we'd each go down, in the past, like some screwy math
from a twisted continuum that would not quit.
Was that the Christmas I got the Johnny Seven
and tossed my six-shooters away, lost the handcuffs,
was a mercenary diamond among the roughs,
prepared to gun down evil to get to Heaven?
All those hours I had to hear sad Hank Williams tunes
amplify my mother's deserted afternoons.
Christmas at Groton
One Christmas I gave everyone the same gift --
Jonathan Livingston Seagull. With no money,
I had to think quick. Bookstore credit was the lift
I needed, but the awful Seagull -- well, too funny --
was all they had in numbers. Had to suck it up.
There I was, known to be a teen reading Nietzsche;
the looks on their faces when they tore off the wrap!
Like watching Sisyphus get rolled back to Ditzy.
Hard part was answering the whys that came my way,
their eyes begging me for irony or a prank.
It's all I could afford was not something I'd say;
to remind them of class differences was rank.
I heard the f*cker wrote a sequel to Seagull.
but I quit school ere the next Christmas moon was full.
Pakua with frame.svg.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Author Not Given) Details Source DMCA
Umbrella Christmas in South Korea
Amidst all of the pettiness of pagodas
past, long forgotten in the blues of Japanese
rape, the razed landscapes of occupation cry out,
and I can find no sign of Christmas cheer. I pout,
as I so expected to find the season's trees
on sale; I'd heard the Cross had replaced the lotus.
My umbrella becomes the Christmas tree I need
and I decorate it with paper mà che' stars
that express my homage to a dead tradition
of cosmological wonder. Our sedition
manifested in our materialism leaves scars
that we see in our preoccupation with greed.
Maybe we should have let the Koreans decide
their fate together, but no trees I can't abide.
