when you kiss someone
who is drinking champagne
their mouth, their tongue,
is a cold, sweet shock.

i arrived home
and sat eating grapes
from the refrigerator.

each one had a sister
in your wine,
and every one of them,
bursting in my mouth,
played a recording
of a kiss.

I never liked Santa. I never liked going to the department store to sit on his knee. The flowing white beard was never thick enough to hide the outline of his mandibles. It is no wonder so many small children are left crying and shaking. When I was about four I had the standard childhood epiphany about the economics of Christmas and Santa’s role therein. Out of my nascent greed I learned to hold back my tears. I also learned that if I chewed up the complementary candy cane instead of sucking on it, the strong mint fragrance released would clear the musty, formic acid scent of Santa from my nose.

If you make it to university and study biology, especially entomology, you learn the truth about Santa. Like how he’s not immortal. There is a new Santa every year. When Santa dies, normally on Boxing Day or the day after, exhausted from his deliveries, the largest worker elf is fed the body. Having consumed Santa, the elf undergoes a metamorphosis. He gains weight and height, his vestigial mandibles begin to develop, and the large white beard begins to appear. After three or four days the metamorphosis is complete. The new Santa takes up servicing Mrs. Claus and the production of another generation of elves begins.

I do not believe that Santa is evil, it is just that over time his otherness has become jarring to me. I am grateful he spends most of the year living in isolation from humanity in his Arctic hive, but each holiday season I can not help but think that he is an abomination tolerated out of avarice. And I do not understand what Santa and his elves get from Christmas. The presents must come at a cost. That is what keeps me awake at night.

If you are a fat hairy white guy, and I don’t care how old and jolly you are, you should not be stripping down to boxers and boots just because it got hot under your uniform. You want to be easily identifiable when climbing through shanty town windows in the middle of the night in Haiti, because while the kids might be asleep, their 90 year old insomniac grandmothers will be sitting up in their rocking chairs in the dark fingering their voodoo beads. They will watch you back your fat glowing ass through the window and they will smile.

The first house you try that on, grandma will club you unconscious as soon as you get your head in. You probably won’t even see her. Then she will drag you by your swollen ankles into the middle of the room where she’s going to chant and sprinkle voodoo shit all over you before administering a dose of pufferfish extract that is going to turn you into her fat white zombie slave. In the morning you will help her feed Blitzen to the family. Also, the kids in the Dominican Republic are going to get jack for Christmas.

Over the years you are going to get skinny and dirty and your pretty white beard will become a filthy brown chin turd as you spend the rest of your life as a zombie in a Caribbean slum. Maybe you will be blissfully unaware. Maybe in some small part of your drugged brain you will be regretting Europe’s colonial history and taking your pants off.