Daddy, Drunk at Christmas

Man’s love is like a mystery
you taste in his mustache.

Is it rye, you ask,
or did he spring for scotch?

And is that a whiff of lo mein, or
are you imagining things again,
like him in a restaurant
instead of an alley,
the small space where
he hid from his old man
as a child,
where he hides from the young men now?

The real question is:
why do you holler back
when he hollers,
when he wakes us,
when you know that
this is what he does
every Christmas,
filling that empty
feeling he feels
when he sees
the empty spaces
beneath the tree?