It is time now to admit my folly, admit my easy seasonal delusion, for as the “Holidays” are upon us, and as ever, I become bluesy in a reliable way. I think things like: “Nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jiving too.” Or: “I see my coffin comin’ Lordy Lord in my back door…”
And the terrible Christmas music plays in all public spaces–an auditory toothache; worse really, for you can pull a tooth and once its gone the mind forgives memory the experience–not so with Bing Crosby singing of figgy pudding for God’s sake, that figgy pudding works its way around the dendrites of memory like a snail crawling on broken glass. You will never get rid of Bing. He’s a barnacle on the Superior Colliculi.
I trudge about, thinking of my dead parents, who were hard to live with in life but I miss them all the same; think of my dear dead friends gone too soon; and feel bleached of spirit by the aggressive, bloody monolith of capitalism and its sugar tit music.
For poets, philosophical ideas are all potential lovers as Charles Simic said while writing of Emily Dickinson.
For me, well, the music of this infernal season is like a repo man. Bing Crosby can’t have my soul. It’s not here right now, you can look throughout the house with your pestilential Christmas music leaking out of your pockets. Go on and look. My soul is in some villa outside of Florence, pretending to be Enrico Caruso.
Planet of the Blind 
Listen to the British Paraolympic chorus — that will cheer you.
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