With Wooden Buttons And An Apple Core

i dreamt i traveled and found you there,
in the woods one Christmas Eve,
waiting
by Hayato Nagao
...

Nights before Christmas found me coldly reconciled at a dance party soothed with whiskey, cigarettes, and beautiful young people. Then, waking up in a big old house to a blinking VCR clock telling me that i was to be in the lab in mere minutes, and i was in the same clothes as the night before. Blurry contacts and disoriented, i shake the boy on the couch next to me and we stumble out into the twilight to bundled-up schoolchildren crossing the street and on the playground in the winter morning, our breath frozen before us. i had parked my little red car in a school zone the night before.

Hurry along, all...