I spent Thanksgiving
this year
not in the blue-collar comfort
of my aunt’s house,
nestled somewhere
within a well-buried suburb
of a quaint, but un-noteworthy neighborhood
with walls decorated with Budweiser signs
juxtaposed against portraits of the ****** Mary,
where a football announcer’s voice plays like
conservative talk radio
in the background.

Instead, to save the labor
of my weary immigrant grandmother,
we dressed in Sunday best
and drove ourselves in
three well-packed mini vans
to some elegant hotel restaurant,
ideal for people-watching
from the gaudy, art-deco staircase
while pretending to be in the Great Gatsby.

It didn’t feel natural, though,
that beside a modest turkey breast
with cranberry dressing, sat a beautiful
cut of prime rib, carefully ladled
with truffle au juis–
nor beside a humble dollop
of mashed potatoes and gravy,
should there be salmon to die for,
and berries slathered with brie.

The food I nibbled
with bites of nervous guilt,
as the impeccably dressed waiter
exhaustedly refilled our water glasses,
nodding his head reflexively
to my mouse squeaks of “thank you’s”

What monsters are we,
letting these people work on Thanksgiving Day?
Grandma said, calmly, that some people
are just happy to be paid,
recounting
her impoverished childhood
in war-torn Germany—
that to simply muffle
the aggressive rumbling
of a days-empty stomach,
she and her brother
would ****** a handful of
potatoes from a government farm,
not many, but just enough
as she grimaced
at the ever-so-slight mealiness
of her rosemary-infused pork chop—
the woman who couldn’t afford ham
until she became a citizen.

We nodded quietly and
swallowed our privileged guilt,
washed down with
politely cut bites
of perfectly cooked salmon.

I’ve spent time I’d rather not count
hoping fruitlessly,
by an impenetrable sense of obligation
that can only belong to the delusional,
with the last specimen of hope
whose blood I have drained dry,
just waiting
for a disappointment
that I now expect.

I wake up every morning with
hopes of you,
and rush out of bed as though I haven’t waited months
just to hear you say something,
     just something
          only once…

I come home every night with
erased expectations
that dutifully regenerate
in stubbornly constant dreams
haunted by your face

Wake up.
It’s a new day
Just like yesterday
and every day before that
were meant to be.

You uproot me from my convictions
and expose my skin to air,
dusting away
with saintly tenderness
the accumulated crumbs of earth
with which I have buried myself.
I breathe
as an organism full of blood;
with the vigor of life
and the comfort of purpose.

I wanted to thank someone
for you;
as though, just maybe,
there could be something
beyond us, cognizant
of my microscopic existence,
sending me with grace
a signal of hope, blooming
out of the impossible soil of chaos.

I think I could be a theist
if I spent enough time with you—
a perfect and strange little blessing
to an imperfect and strange little life.
Sometimes I wonder
if someone put you here,
but it’s simply too human
to think the world beautiful
and believe it was there for me
to find it that way.

You are mortal,
regardless of how you choose
to go about it. There will be
an infinite amount of time
surrounding the beginning
and end
of your hilariously brief existence.
The universe will go on without you.

You are one
out of seven billion
humans, inhabiting a planet
we are slowly destroying,
orbiting about
an un-noteworthy star
within a dull suburb of
the Milky Way Galaxy—
one out of billions, by the way—
which is expected
to eventually collide with Andromeda,
flinging Earth like a ping-pong ball
into oblivion.

No matter what you have done
with your life, or
how special you think you are,
we are all
born naked
and screaming,
and defecate when we die.
You will eventually be a corpse.
Your beautiful
     animate
          breathing body
will decompose into something
revolting.

If it’s any consolation, your mistakes
(like your achievements) mean nothing.
What have you got to lose?
Don’t discard the fruit
blemished only
by one unsightly spot—
Let its juices drip
savagely down your chin;
savor the frustratingly temporary
sweetness
that will never be tasted again.

You know I’ve been
far too scatterbrained
to write anything
reasonably coherent.
But frankly,
the word “coherence”
has no place
if I were to truthfully describe
anything that’s happened
between you and I.

I could sit here
and type fruitlessly
until I conceived
the perfect
soul-wrenching metaphor
to illustrate every
painful nuance
of our struggle.
But, unfortunately
there is nothing
terribly poetic
about absolute
*******.

I suppose
I could say that
we were “the dream
that eventually got
its rude awakening” but
that’s stupidly cliché,
and all I want to do
is fall back asleep.

The winds have retired
to stagnant air—a stillness
restrained by tension.
One that can only signify
a gnawing anticipation
of the unpredictable.

Anything that can be said
shouldn’t be, but the words
shunned to our minds
burn at our tongues—
and it only takes
one forlorn look
to remind you
that the storm will not
dissipate if you only
shut your window.

What have we become?
We died at the pinnacle
with the ruthless anticipation
of a stillborn infant—
a corpse before a body,
decimated by the arbitrary brutality
of nature.

I pray to a god I shouldn’t believe in
for some eventual day
of enlightenment—
where the dilemma lies, however,
isn’t whether this day
should occur,
but rather when we’ll strip out of
dignity, and stand in the nakedness
of how dearly we love
to torment ourselves.

We were the senseless
death of potential—
where the shadow fell
between every beautiful thing
that could have been,
and all the reasons why
we could not have them.