Quiet streets at dusk, pregnant
with the heat of a thousand failures
humid december
skeleton-staffed suburbia
nobody around to curse
reckless drivers, coasting
past clocked-off street lamps,
empty palaces.
christmas lights outside my home.
not my home, now, but still
there it is; sans us, sans you
an embarrassment of neon.
slow down, pull over.
bathe in it, our
adolescence subsumed
by fluorescence.
live each night
on/off/on/on/off/on
cables snaking across
lawns we hated mowing.
there were Hannukah candles
flickering when it was my home
you couldn’t see them from
the street, they glimmered
without glowing.
deafening;
these christmas lights
outside my home
an aborted theme park
for a postcode of ghosts
in the rearview they echo,
like the ambulances
that arrived on the day we knew
this would no longer
be our home
the radio, it sluices
through the Silent Night;
under flashing traffic lights
electronic angels sing.
