On the first day of Christmas, I spent all day breathing on the window and tracing familiar faces in the fog.

On the second day of Christmas, my mother sent to me every unpleasant phone call about failed job interviews or bad grades or having just not been in contact for too long and these I threw away without much regret. Each cried out in furious ones and zeros as they shattered against the base of the garbage bin.

On the third day of Christmas, I observed the graceless gait of an orphaned child, like walking on marbles or faulty animatronics. A scale model geriatric.

On the fourth day of Christmas, an ex-lover gave me old photographs and letters filled with lustful words, wasps in their nest, and all the self-image issues she managed to create wrapped in purple lace and packaged lovingly in an old shoe box labeled “Hush Puppies,” which I could have taken as a metaphor for something, but didn’t.

On the fifth day of Christmas, I was charged with two counts of assault and battery with no apparent motive. In all truth, however, I was drunk and angry and alone and those kids looked just so damn happy and I wanted to tear the hope from their starry eyes, dream by dream.

On the sixth day of Christmas, I was a stroke personified.

On the seventh day of Christmas, Jesus put his hand on my shoulder, listened to me cry, got uncomfortable, and politely excused himself from the room. He still won’t answer my calls.

On the eighth day of Christmas, I suffocated the flames grinding in a child’s heart with nothing more than a blood stained coat and the miracle of conviction.

On the ninth day of Christmas, a city in the cradle caved in on itself under the weight of its own self-loathing, a crevasse down life’s half-moon, the wrinkles in Mother Earth’s weary smile. I am starving, naked, on the floor.

On the tenth day of Christmas, I brought home a girl from the bar and we touch and kiss and fondle and claw and shred and splinter and break open all over my bedsheets for want of being held just one more time before I begin scrubbing these bloody hand prints off the walls, silently, from a distance.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, I had not eaten for a month and have never felt more powerful.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, there is more dirt in my mouth than sound in my ears and broken old men everywhere are waiting for calls from the children they had to bury themselves.