I Don’t Go Home for Christmas Because I

Don’t Want to See

the alcoholism all over the kitchen table or the scapegoats all lined up along the cemetery or the sounds of the choruses on fire or the feds who stormed into my uncle’s home thinking it was another home but they had the wrong house but the door still paid the price and how they never fixed it, the door lying there dead, my uncle refusing to fix that corpse of wood, so that a stray dog, sometimes, would walk in and out and in to his house, and I went over there and my uncle was sitting on his urine-colored couch, watching CSI when he hates the police, but it was TV police who all looked like models and who had words put in their mouths written by a graduate of Harvard who had read five hundred plays in his life and turned the cops into little micro-Jesuses, all harmless and beautiful. And I don’t go home because my cousin hung himself from a tree in his front yard and that front yard is still there and that tree is still there and that ghost is still there and so I stay here. Alone.