Christmas Bazaar

The true gifts of the inescapable
Holiday festival are the tent pegs

It stakes for episodic memory,
That painted canvas dwelling of the self.

You have your own. Yours are not the Christmas
You wandered through a frozen inversion,

Or summered in a New Zealand garden,
Or when you were too small to understand

Why your aunt, uncle, and cousins showed up
In snowy, predawn dark with their presents.

You have your own stakes, your own festival
Memories you raise to frame who you are.

You have your own sideshow in the circus
Choiceless, until you up stakes and move on.