Failed Halloween Poem

 

Halloween Deserted

Wounded paper bats,

Front porch ghouls

And their howling, gaping maws, 

Leaves crinkling and crunching

Like petrified petals of dried, burnt flesh

Or fat brittle beetles 

Wheezing and cracking open

Beneath my slow, heavy footfalls

As I march in loneliness 

Towards the slaughtering procession,

The candy-corn-scented gathering 

Looking to trample over me 

Squeezing out my guts and stringing them 

Through thinning scarecrows,

Scattering my ineffectual essence

Into the last sharpened divinity

Of petrified, orange moonlight.

All the festering jack-o-lanterns 

With the top of their heads unevenly cleaved off,

Their jagged self-harm expressions 

Mocking the depths of the ignited hollowness

Lurking behind my eyes,

It all means 

Less than nothing 

As October slits its wrists

And painfully drains away. 

Frozen in the dripping autumn sun,

Abandoned at the convergence of 

All my destroyed tomorrows

Lurking and awaiting their attack 

While plastic Frankensteins and little orphaned ghosts

Shout in various derangements

Down the spiraling darkened streets

Gleefully chewing down razor blades

And carmelized diseases,

I submit myself to the ghastly uncertainties

Droning from the trees

Ringing my doorbell with atomic-yellow eyes

And children’s skeletal fingers

Composing their smile.

Tell it to take my frayed, hemorrhaged ghost
Out from within me,

Send it to the desert 

To the buried catacombs 

To the time-worn forgotten libraries 

To the rising crypts of harmonizing undead

To the abyssal threshold

Swirling with water-colored blacks and oranges

Sending ancient, marbled signals 

To the constellations of glittering jester masks

Hovering on the brink

Of an apocalyptic collapse.

In the desert, no pumpkins grow

No suburban blocks stretched into disgusting infinity 

No souls dance through a prescribed, empty joy

No ancient cemeteries to usher in 

An autumnal rain 

Complimenting the glow and torment

From holidays desecrated 

And forced into pained oblivion

After my unplanned exodus. 

No Halloween to haunt me 

With murdered memories

And isolating inactions.

Nothing…there’s nothing here 

But a specter in red lipstick   

I see shifting in the windswept distance,

She is calling

Telling me, without parting lips, 

I need her skin

For the end of the world. 

How did it know

To descend upon my lacerated remains,

To join me in the circulating pit 

Of time’s rigor-mortis grip 

And breathe in the smoke and ashes

From the autumn forest 

I burned and trampled 

Into my self-imposed desert

Of ineffectuality

And meaninglessness?

How did it know 

To haunt me 

At the perfect moment

Before the dawn of 

My Halloween suicide? 

A fellow autumn person, perhaps? 

Jaded and cultivated

By life’s endless carnival of

Miasmiac sorrows. 

A question of reopened, abused trust 

To consume another perfect phantom 

And once more entomb myself with another 

In the swaddling, barbed confines

Of November’s encroaching 

Dead, gray clouds. 

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