Lights danced on shivering trees dressed
in a blanket of snow while a tale was told

of a boy, born to be king, to never know choice.

I kissed Christmas in someone else’s shadow
and we whispered in the absence of his voice.

I dreamt of a crib where a kid had kept faith
for a while, as a child, while you watched me

sleeping, naked on a bed still fresh from his folds.

You wished for us longer than a festive fumbling
of flesh in the emptiness of his ephemeral flight

but our fate was like my faith; not as tightly nailed
to a cross as the kid who was crucified as a king.

I waked away from the tinsel toe and your touch

and left you

to smooth out the stains we screwed upon his folds.

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

This month is about looking back at Paris to acknowledge all that has slipped away, like the lips once kissed, the snowflakes since melted and the faith, since fallen. As a kid I wanted to believe in Santa for longer than my age allowed because I didn’t want to let the magic end, I grew up in the church and tried so hard to see the truth in what I was being taught that it took a long time to see how closely they were wrapped in lies. When I first came to Paris at 22, I had my first kiss on Christmas night. I was alone and living in a hotel and everyone I knew had gone back to Ireland and I wanted to find the magic again, even if it came in the form of three nights in the arms of a man who wasn’t mine, who was lonely because his boyfriend had gone off to see his family for the holidays.

Sometimes we try to find the magic wherever we can and do our best to ignore faith, fate, the fates or the folds we didn’t make.