Wait a minute, is it already Christmas again
Seems I just took down the lights and the tree
Is there no rest for the downtrodden and weary
This season sometimes takes the Merry Gentleman out of me

So I load up the sleigh with the dog and the kids
The old beat up station wagon I drive
On the hunt for this years perfect tree
We'll be lucky if we make it back home alive

As we jingle all the way to the local tree farm
Six kids and a dog singing at the top of their lungs
With only twelve days left before Christmas
My **, **, **, is already long gone

Picking the best tree out within our budget
My wife says Charlie Brown would be proud
I ask smarty pants Mrs. Santa what she meant by that
She'd rather not say with the little elves around

Before an argument even ensues
I've lost the battle before I hit the front line
You wonder how I'm so confident of that
The same thing happened last year at this time

As I struggle to get the tree off the roof of my jalopy
While Jack the dog in the frost is nipping at my toes
I fall to the ground with visions of sugar plums dancing in my head
Waking up to the dogs frozen tongue stuck up my nose

Finally with the tree set up in the front parlor
I notice it leans bad to one side
Taking my chainsaw to alleviate the problem
The gas fumes **** my kids parakeet out right

With Hobby Lobby open late for the holidays
I was able to purchase the product I need
Working late into the wee morning hours
I did a good job shellacking the parakeet

I'm not sure that my kids even noticed
Or brought up the question what for
But they sure like the shinny new ornament
Hanging next to the hamster that disappeared the year before

Well, I survived another preparing for Christmas
As subconsciously I'm being led
To wrap myself in last years present "The Snuggie"
And dream of those sugar plums dancing in my head

Love is a roller-coaster with volatile emotions emerging from within.
To deny its existence will inevitably cause irrefutable sorrow guiltier than a sin.
Tis’ is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Oh, the wise words of Alfred Lord Tennyson, how you enlighten us from afar.

An unfathomable angst intertwined with a euphoric state of passion.
Caged with inaction yet stupefied by its glorious reaction.
This volatility is not confusion, you see.
I am witnessing myriad waves of emotions emerging from the abyss within me!

Is it true? Could it be?
Has my unconscious decided to compose a poetic tragedy out of me?
Triggering aloofness and indifference to the goodness it perceives?
Have I become too jaded to feel real love literally?

This tender feeling deriving from my soul,
Yearns to journey beyond the engrained barb-wired pine road.
However, the universe continues to reverse the roles.
Now it's apathy that causes the heartache of this man’s soul.

By: Michael M. De La Fuente

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

It would make more sense to fall once
To love until it surrenders to the hurt
Found in folded laundry socks
And empty grocery carts.
When I met the soul a second time
I tried to run so far and fast
That I stumbled into a war
Of paper plated pizza and sweatpants.
Maybe there is a second way to turn back
To get tangled in the way it feels
But remain attached to your puppet string.
I fell for you because it made sense
To a believer of this one time chance.
But now the soul is settled on a goodbye kiss
And I am afraid of losing my own grip.
But I let it go.
And feed love to the cats.