A christmas carol, kind of.

Our Christmas is
like the long quiet
after a joke, that hollow
space where dad pours wine
till his glass overflows
staining the carpet like a
leaky heart.

Mum stays in bed without
wine
without us
a calendar of cats
can’t make her smile
not even April cat that wears sunglasses
not even June cat that swims in a bowl.

Wait,
I can tell already that you think I’m too sad
that I’m being too much like me.
You told me so on a bone white night
when I rubbed my wrists on a brick wall
to stop all the buildings from burning
but tonight
I learned that
it’s not fair, to keep your home within someone else
and with this distance
I can tell you about Christmas
and sadness
and silence.

I am silenced
by the
absence in my mother’s eyes
my sister’s ethereal smile
relieves our dead-weight doom
but only momentarily.

I lean in and whisper:

Annie, our room, it won’t be ours for much longer
four walls that contained us when we drunk
together and threw knickers out the window
that window won’t be ours -

She pushes my head and
straps her hair into knotted
works of art.

Nothing troubles me more
than having a family
that I don’t understand.

We double booked our trees
both martian green, standing
like pylons that guard our sad
little cult. I try to unleash
conversation that I trapped
from last year
but nothing
comes out.

If only they could see
the language
the words
they are warm
they will make us happy.

After the news I paint my toes
in Christmas shades, not our Christmas
but Christmas you see on TV.

Clumpy drops of water make
vertiginous waves of my Rudolph Red
because this year, even our roof
won’t stop crying.

Are you still listening?
Is this too sad?
Why don’t you pull on your end of the cracker
and snap us in two
whilst I wish, hard
to remake our story
into something
I can put my voice into
without weight or ruin or –

Outside I hear
the house next door
where cheeks glow red not raw
I see grass-green silk – the mother’s dress
fingers link like fairy lights, I bob my head
to the beat of their togetherness
my palms out-stretched
catching debris from the winter sun
I dance a dance
a dance
for the Christmas outcasts.