All Hallow’s

(*Author’s Note: since it’s the spookiest time of the year, here’s a throwback poem I wrote from 2013 about Halloween.)

Bones for the Boneyard
And the Reaper’s sickle sharpens
And creeps creep lithely
On the catpaws of night.

The gates, they swing open
On bloodrusted latches
As clocks tick towards blackness
With pendulum swings.

Midnight’s jawbone unhinges
Lurching hungrily forward
Scythe-hanging moon
Grinning a pallid white smile.

Bones for the Boneyard
And the Reaper’s sickle sharpens
And candlelight shivers
Guttering light wobbling drunkenly against darkness’s tide

Tremulous whispers
Let fly phantasm breath
Chill air sinking fangs into lungs
With malice undeniable.

The fingertips of fear slip silken across the flat of your scalp
Hangman’s knot easing gently over your throat
Tightening, constricting, contracting
Something stirs in the shadows between real and imagined.

Peripheral demons
Dance like flames licking flames
Terror sharpens to a point
Whittling rational to insane.

Bones for the Boneyard
And the Reaper’s sickle sharpens
Down we all spiral our drippings
Turned to drops.

Cadaver silence hovers thickly
Mortuary still
Leaves brushing leaves
By wind of by foot.

Echoes are stolen by sneak-thieving ebony hands
And the arterial treelimbs achingly inch
Hovering above with unknown
Ill-seeming intent.

Tonight is the night
Of All Hallow’s Eve
That Autumnal breeze
May be breath on your neck.

Bones for the boneyard
And the Reaper’s sickle sharpens. . .