Christmas Conscripts

Morose, mechanical, maniacal, the Target rioting hordes stampede into stores, eating their own, rampaging, frightening withered Santas in costumes red as nose bleeds.

Seated on cheap, seasonal thrones, like beef jerky totems, the Santa Corp observe, wide-eyed, the shopping ferocious tide, part animal, part cannibal, wielding credit cards like razor blades, human batteries with their carnival girths of Big Macs, heart attacks, lunging down aisles, hunger/gatherers, on the hunt that has no end.

Shop!
You must!
Favorite Things for all!
And to all a rude night!

Crazed air, burning hair, snowglobe stares, parking lot despair, straining the nervous system of even the most Wii-trained amoebas.

It's a cinch to lynch the grinch without pausing to realize the first four letters of his title spell "grin."

More? No!
More? Yes!
Clean up in aisle four
Someone's puked a peppermint, ribboned mess.

The Gobi Desert of Discount Prices. Velvet jacketed shysters, bearded vaunted burgermeisters with steins filled with beer, eyes bulging with leers and ruby, obscene lips crying "More! More! And more of the more!"

The pampered TV millions still need the primal pounding of feet, the adrenalin soaked seeking, lining up sniper sights, perpetrating take-downs upon the cold tile mall floor fifty feet from the elementary school choir singing odes to St. Sam Walden, the original Father Christmas.

But it's frenzy to exhaust all endorphins, making saints of all the sidewalk whores and to leave with throbbing appendages all the more seeking hordes.

And when Christmas day ends at a eleven o'clock in the morning, the carnage is carted away in body bags. The war dead stacked in the garage, their histories recorded in crinkled, bloodstained store receipts.

And as Daddy Gobshite and Mommy Waxencrotch stand before the hearth with their eggnog, the napes of their necks are positioned perfectly to receive the blows of the speeding, returning boomerangs of their credit card bills in the new year.