My Christmas Hymn

I frantically just threw together Christmas in an hour –
driven by some unsuspected catapulting power:
I think my city finally just got me in a headlock: clocked me,
made me knuckle under to her twinkly kinky wonder –
made me stop behaving like a blocked-up prig: pricked me
painfully with sprigs of sharpened plastic drug-store holly –

something almost jolly – so that crazily I’d dazedly entwine
and swerve around her Mannahatta curves to this or that
of her effulgent cornucopia, emporia, snatching candy canes
and such until whatever I had touched became essential
props in her bright grand December dance: she
played me like a ukulele, bopped me up and down –

around – like some strung puppet in a trance, jingling bells –
subjecting me to tingling spells: coercing schemes of heaven
from her many hells, a loud exacting simulacrum
of an unimpeded joy – so similar to it that now I’m home,
and now I’ve hauled my bags upstairs – I just about could
swear that I’ve begun to care about this folderol again.

But really it is always she: this city of my heart who makes
me start and stop and turn toward creating the most
skewed untoward accommodations to her every whim.
She’s the one to whom I sing my Christmas hymn.




.