December...Fuck You By Christina Osborn

Not only are you the month upon which the entire retail industry of western civilization feasts each year, you snake your icy fingers around the cock of commercialism, driving the worms further indoors to breed on stale carols and the scent of pine needles in a treeless boneyard of red and white plastic. Like an aging parasite you suck the last fetid tendrils off the corpse of a corporate giant that has been rotting on the rooftops of cities for millennia, a corpse that is kept alive by a chain reaction of electro-shock shopping sprees and the ovens into which American consumers shovel their hours, cuddled up in greenback government issue coveralls. Not only are you the end and the beginning of an imaginary cycle based on the groaning of the planets as they struggle to escape an inescapable magnetism, you are not even numerically correct. Not only are you persistent, you aren’t consistent. How do you explain the way snow doesn’t fall in the Utah desert but it piles up in Trinity county on pine trees and trailers and the stockade the boss built to keep his trigger hippies safe and medicated in his outdoor hospital.  We waited to feel your breath on our necks as we bent over piles of uncut marijuana with frozen fingers and uncashed checks. You are the cage in which I woke to the song of sugar in my veins after drinking all that whipped cream vodka and taking those pills. I called my friend who’s an ex-junkie and he told me sorry the half life on suboxin is eighteen hours, you’ll have to ride that wave. That was the morning when john texted me and said he didn’t want to talk to me anymore and all I had to hold onto was a bowl full of puke and a brand new fishman soloist that I was too sick to set up and all I could think of was the night he told me we were both the same, but we’re not. we were so different i guess being tangled up in buffalo skins and smoke and sweat didn’t mean a connection it just mean a brief parallel, two broken railroads running alongside each other over a thin brace of land but then redividing as soon as the land widened like my eyes to pull in as much firelight as possible so I could see every shadow play across the roll of his skin, so like the skin of a warm fruit plucked so many Decembers before and left to ripen in the Mojave sunlight as he raced his dirtbike up crybaby hill, the same hill i climbed to remember him after remembering is the only way I could touch him, remembering his rough hand and the way it tipped up a whiskey bottle in the November moonlight, never knowing he would be rotting in a box one month later, three days after the biggest commercial holiday in history, he did it on my sister’s birthday and December I haven’t forgiven you yet, I feel this sense of dread as you draw closer, like your cold hands are coming for my throat, like everything bad that will happen will happen in December. My skeletons are buried in your basement but they walk again, they walk in December.