Merry Christmas

The lots are populated with lost trees. They have been uprooted from their homes, their feet have been bound and they have been dragged into these parking lots. The people walk up and down the aisles and they show their racism. Some are too short, others too sparse, some are even the wrong color. The trees have no idea what they are doing here, their amputated leg rests on cold asphalt. There is no water for them, their leg stranded on the solid black ground no nature around them. The exhaust chokes them, the skys seem darker here, the noises unrelenting. They don't know why the people pick them up and spin them around before they deem them unworthy and allow them to slump back down. They have been targeted for years, they think it might be ethnic cleansing, every year around this time the trucks arrive, the people pour out and the massacre begins. The poplar trees and the oaks watch in horror but they are glad they are not the targets. What have the pines and firs done to deserve this they ask, they always seemed so peaceful, they have angered someone they say, whispering it through the wind, signals from swaying branches. Ethnic purification an extermination of those evergreen trees, the triangular shape is wiped from landscapes.

The lucky ones will find homes. They will bless the homes they inhabit like a foster child with a short life span. They fill the home with holiday fragrance while they are draped in lights made to look like whorish victims of christmas commercialism. The glitter and glamour hides their sadness, clowns crying behind their maskes. Like hookers in the redlight district, draped in lights and decorations, put on display while inside they cry for their former life. The tree thinks of its home, the squirrel that raised her children in its branches, the way the sun used to creep up over the hills and break through the early morning mist. Tears of sap run down their trunks. This cruel race that captures them and places them inside their homes for a couple months each year. They know the stories, the bodies of the dead that line the streets after the festivities are complete, the browning bodies, brittle to the touch, laying in the gutters waiting to be trucked off again.

But these are the lucky ones, what about those that are not chosen to be adorned. The ones with bald spots, the short ones, and the unbalanced ones? They are pushed to the outskirts of society judged by their looks and ostracized by the masses that pour their eyes over their scared bodies. A market of life, buying and selling lives. They are left homeless, doomed to the fires or to just wither away far from their fields and mountains. They are unappreciated and unpityed, if they don't get chosen nobody crys for them, they are tossed to the side and forced to fiend for themselves. They don't have welfare they have no choices, they are marooned in this new cold place. As they lie beneath the stars they dream of the days before, how big they could have grown, how much they would have accomplished. Their fate is not up to them, the stars used to make them happy, the calls of the wild sang them to sleep, the breeze from the river rustled their branches and they were content. The savages that plunder their families parade around them eyeing them and criticizing their branches, while they are forced to mouth their objections. Like the downtrodden humans they must suffer their fate alone, nobody is willing to help, the other trees had watched them idly as they were cut down and thrown in sacks before being sped away. Why didn't anyone help them, how could you let them suffer and just watch. Everyone was resigned to their paths no one was willing to stop this, the treatment of their friends, the death of their family, why wouldn't anyone get involved. Just like us the other trees had other concerns, the suffering of some does not effect the happiness of the rest. Out of sight out of mind they said. But the firs glared at them encased in these houses, they pleaded for change, people just looked at them, willingness to promote change and equality are always such a burden. This path has been set, the wheels of this society are just following the wheel trenches of the wagons before them. Obervers of life, watching from an escalator. Do you see what they are doing? They ask you for help, for change, for anything, people just avert their eyes and walk forward.

merry christmas