Sunday, December 13, 2009

Suspended Animation

Dear Santa

Seeing how
I haven't seen you now
in more than many while's quite,
I thought I'd write
this letter laden wish,
not big enough to be a list,
as it's just one thing,
and that thing is else no thing,
but a pod. Yes, I wrote pod, but not

any pod
you'd find hanging green
on a bush. I mean those lean
bits of oblong
and white that best belong
in the movies where one's out knocked
and then inside tucked
cozy, waiting for long trips,
or patches too rough, to easy slip

by. I'll glow
in my pod, yellow
digits the ticks down-counting
till zeros sing
alarming doors to whir
and pop, dropping a discovered
when both safely sound
and reanimated found
on the far side of neither's going.

But knowing
you, Santa, to be
a bastard red and jolly,
if I know you
at all, then here's my due:
one ragged blanket from Good Will,
some pretty pink pills,
and an unassembled cough
instructing me to "go sleep it off."

5 comments:

Jenny said...

Many fines lines; I especially like these:

"But knowing
you, Santa, to be
a bastard red and jolly,
if I know you"

For some reason I came to think of the Christmas episode in Bukowski´s "Post Office". I do not like the Christmas season, I have to admit.

Francis Scudellari said...

Thanks Jenny. It was actually much more like Bukowski in its initial draft, but then I got caught up in the rhyming and it became more Seuss (with the Bukowski still lingering at the end).

Claudette Cohen said...

Lovely Seussian start honing into a Buki-esque end.

Francis Scudellari said...

Thanks Claude... a strange marriage, but that's fairly typical for me :)

Anders Enochsson said...

You summoned up my feelings perfectly for this season