Literary Vandals

by Robert Dean

being alone as Burl Ive’s vocally tap dances his way through the standard that we endlessly hear every Yule tide season.  

Bows sit on packages under trees and there are cups filled with warm hooch while elves dance on the television like a cultural salve for our collective holiday sins. We’re all hoping for a gift-wrapped heart where the paper is ripped off with loving claws where hope radiates through the fingers. Christmas morning cocktails taste like small boxing matches against God.

Standing in the kitchen watching the eggs coagulate in my butter-soaked pan, there are sirens in the distance. Christmas sirens, the ones you typically ignore when you’re living every other day of the year but say a silent prayer hoping the person won’t get taken away in a body bag. 

There is a silent piano around us all at times, sometimes when the tinsel reflects the light of the trees and it hits against your bones, the chords it plays feel a little less like Snoopy dancing on a red roof top.  

Merry Christmas. 

Merry Christmas.