Ode to the Scare

With each new Midautumn, a dreary midnight

Begets ancient curses of great varied fright;

A thinning—a loophole—for God's misfit toys,

Manifesting some passage to spook girls and boys;

The cycles of seasons, the dice-rolls of stars

Align just precisely to bring the bizarre…

Come hither and hear now, hear the tale loud

Of the occasion on which we’ve found ourselves now:

Once every year on Halloween night,

Dark and dead things follow the light

On doorsteps, in butternuts with flickering flame,

They roam earthly streets in their wicked game;

From wretched nooks, horrid crannies of uncountable number,

Slime-ridden, forsaken, awakened from slumber,

These forgotten, disgraced, ghastly beings from beyond

Emerge from great depths, rankest cavern, coldest pond;

Unknown, clothed in shadow, half-beasts of murk

Seek secluded corners in which to lurk

And await soundly the coming of folk

To pounce and to prey on, to prod and to poke,

Creeping and crawling in pursuit of fright,

Leaping and lolling in frivolous delight;

Endless, nameless, infamous, revered

In ritual—though, of course, most merely feared—

They are many, many-clawed, many-toothed, many-eyed

Legions of both barely living and died!—

Hide away, dear children, from dread Mr Hyde!—

And hunchbacks and hounds of horrendous hides…

Or ghoulish green goblinlike gargoyle grinches…

Or even phantasmagoric fearful freak finches…

A toad with a song that over gardens lingers,

A wasteland full of zombies with salad for fingers,

A trickster, a fiend, a dream-dwelling demon

One-eyeballed oddball beside blue behemoth,

Funky forms of flesh that gurgle and shout,

Transylvanian terrors that twist all about,

Rulers of everything, bangers that mash,

Gorgons and gremlins and corned creeps and hash,

Jinkies and juices and hissing hogs of grass,

Jeepers and jolly old woodsmen with class,

Coral-lined creatures locked in a loch,

Needles and beetles and sisters that mock,

Nobles of pumpkin and crimson and lich,

Undying gastropod, flying jellyfish

Crying tears that blaze into hellish white stars

To the sons of Saturn and spiders from Mars

And devouring titans that snap, crackle, pop

Like the thrillers of Michael—torture, dance, stab, and chop—

Moonwalking boogeymen that bug in pitch black;

On dark-side dunes, lurk Lord, worm Arrak,

Cracking release and daft poison brew,

Misty mountain smog, seafoam's call-lull to lieu:

Old Gods made of orators' hearts for above,

For the blackening skies, the fowl void loved,

Beating and squeaking like bruises and boots,

Nevermore to bear any outsider's fruits,

Such as guys that are bad, and purple ones even,

Maneating Audreys, Lecters, spectres, and Stephen

Strange are things and people of this scheming sort

And hordes of similarly vile cohorts;

A wedlocked Johnny, a shimmering haunt

And Wendy goes running away now, how gaunt

To woodlands of beasties long left in longing want

Of a living dead girl or a harlequin jaunt—

Insane—left lying unwise—like a possum—

Penniless—laughing and killing is awesome,

Not a joke to a prince—of rats that fly rad,

Whether brawling in bedlam or voivode as Vlad,

Quit clowning and horsing with such lack of piety,

Get your head on straight, we live in a-nxiety

For the worrying and worshipping of things that go boom,

Exorcising through homes—holy things loom

And do battle with islanders or tormented teens

With weirding ways or warring warrens that seem not to scream

At ghosts and faces of skulls and death

That waited with bated Bates Bateman breath

'Til grisly ghouls all came from every tomb

From their humble abodes to seal your doom,

From black lagoon, outer space, his house in R'lyeh,

THINGS from families, swamps, Antarctica—

There's a monster approaching—it's right behind you!—

To the tune of Toccata and Fugue, Siouxsie Sioux,

Oingo and Boingo and Oogie and BOO!—

Something dooby-doo put a spell on you!—

It, Zim, Djinn, Shin Gojira, Yokai, Kali, Kodama, Crowley,

Biblical, burning, turning wheels chant, “Holy, holy, holy,”

Boxtroll, Bigfoot, Babadook, Beelzebub, Baldi, Billy, Mandy, Manticore,

Fellows of every Shape and size—ye olde spirits of yore:

Psychopompous Alebrije, Alux, Ouroboros, Leviathan, Jormungandr, Gengar,

Clovers in fields, polters in geists, “I’m sorry, Dave or Jon,

Memento Mori,” Xenomorph, Oni, Cenobite, Deadite, Davy Jones,

Necronomiconical, nightmarish, chimeric, crossbred crones,

Heroes of brine, alchemical Anubis, and Pie’s forgotten brothers,

Homes on hills and wisps and wills and close-encountered Others,

Ed’s Gein, Munson, Munch, Mothman, Momo, Mother Mother, monkey’s paw,

Rancid Rake, Ragnarok, RackaRacka, Raptor, Russian Sleep, oo-ee-oo-ah-ah,

Putrid plagues of pitiful prowling poorly-pieced Pazuzuesque Paimon,

1408, 237, 173, 731,

Jeff, Jason, Reaper, Ripper, Manson, Munster, Mothra,

Candyman, Krueger, Crypt Keeper of mummies most macabre,

Twilight Ghost, Witchbuster, Friendly Zone, Ghost Doctor,

Grim, grinning, gruesome, gloomy, goosebump-inducing gossamer,

Horror-haunted hollow-husks howl, "It's alive!"

Frankenweenie, Fazbear, wait with friends on the other side:

Spooky, scary, slender Skellingtons of Summerween,

Somebody's watching mean machines terminate times thirteen,

Sulking Slimer, Slappy, Sweeney, scissor sans hands,

I wanna get a job in a Rock N' Roll band!—

Went down to Georgia and Lavender Town,

Chigurh on Cramps backed by Scrooge in nightgown—

Hark! May Nosferatu strike ye down!—

Where the wild things are sure to invert your frown,

Like Scarecrow's soliloquies to tell in the dark:

Rosemary, Carrie, and Cujo that barks,

Cheshire Death Eaters, destroyers of worlds,

The damned, the bride, the goriest girls,

The rings and castles and corpses unfurl

A 24 hundred year old tale, it’s a whirl:

Hocus and pocus and locusts among us

Make satanic panic and evil death fungus—

An uncanny periphery in an eerie valley,

Of solemn Gollum-golems and ragdoll Sally—

Apophenic anomalies—Azathoth, Aragog, Alices—

Eek!—ooky irking pareidolic paralysis—

Button and glutton and marrow and barrel,

Tricks of the eye and chicks in feral peril

Of hags, dire straits in locked, shocked, licked, and shook quagmire gates

Of bogs, marshy, melancholy, mangled up and tangled up fates

In apocalyptic abyss of Tartarus foul,

Sinister scallywag’s scourge of insidious scowl

With gigantinormous jaws and hideous jowls

Or weary warlock of dragon, pen, howl,

Tower of terror, black mask, barren mansion,

Hooliganish, hooting, hairy homunculi dimension,

Peeks into powerful cultic codexes

With secrets of sorrowful grimy toad hexes,

Mysterious musings in creaking crevice of hall

And moaning and crooning at this year's winter ball,

Sickly, prickly, dear prudence of whining vines,

Weeping willows and thorns and horns of dank mines,

Ugly ugnaught, vaudeville voodoo, cheap chupacabras,

Frightful fae fly-lords cast away crazed candelabras,

Bermudan-Lemurian lost land of blind liger,

Jurassic jerks next to be bought by Bob Iger,

Bubbling, boiling, babbling brutes,

Troubling, toiling, travelling newts,

Wonky white-walkers, wistfully whistling,

Wacky white-maskers, worrisomely whispering,

Ethereal, otherworldly, ephemeral demiurge,

Oregonian, organ-guzzling, bone-crushing purge,

Strangling, mystical, mangy undead,

With sawed off and hacked up hanging-tree heads,

Scurrying critter-forms of moss-ridden coves

And surreal slither-swarms frolic in droves,

Leather-bound tomes filled with candy corn

And cider-based potions from a far farm, forlorn,

Cruel cauldrons of ill-willed villains, chilling,

Gruelling, coloured pills have one psychically squealing,

Sordid and squalid, scaly winged-serpent,

Unidentifiable missing link incident—pertinent,

Startling birds of prey, man-made crimes of the future,

By Ba’al’s esoteric societal sutures,

Seance in stinking patch with daggers of gold,

Incomprehensible apparition’s arcane agendas of old,

Croaking, cloaked figures in oak-forest grove,

Chomping, chimpish orcish chumps cooking kids on open stove,

Mischievous miscreant merrymaking, monkeyshining, hoodlum high-jinx,

Papal predator’s piracy, vow judged by black quartz sphinx,

Skull of a skeleton with a burning cigarette,

Cosmic, horrific, half-eaten, harbour-debt regret,

Day of the evil dead, werewolf by night,

Invisible man in bed, seen with sixth sense sight,

Hives of honk-hollering hook-handed hobgob-illusions

In catatonic, coughing, coffin-entombed confusion,

Disgusting, dumb, and dastardly, repulsive Rorschachian faiths,

Goopy, glowing globs of gut-wrenching, wrongful wraiths,

Revolting, ravenous revenant’s rightly wrought rib,

A little trolling, ogling ogre’s fallaciously riddled fib,

Megalomania or Megalovania or megalodon or venom,

Mountains of madness curiously carved, captured by Carl Denham

In the pines with the thing that sometimes wears Prada

In the pale moonlight, flooded with mud and bloody sonata—

Dreadful?—have courage you cowardly poor things,

Cabinets of curiosities and dark shadows don't sting…

"Don't hug me"?—come with us and you will see…

"I'm scared"?—behold at last the canyons of meat

Made of mythical monstrosities of legendary lanternlit lore

In this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad moor

Betwixt twin peaks where gravity falls slow,

Taken to a back room with brain, rotting, of Poe—

A quiet place for a chemical romance full of woe—

Lynched, erased from your head like Chihiro;

The last of us like Lugosi y tambien la Llorona

Lament lurid, languid Ligeti's Lux Aeterna

And leave a little lurch for lighthouse Lacrimosa

To ludovico Ludwig and the lilin to be loathsome;

Can't secure the wayward soul, straight out of luck;

Can't contain the graveyard gothic goo goo muck;

Can't protect the—wait, what's that!?—WAIT, WHAT THE F—

This is Halloween!—this is Halloween!—

Pumpkins scream in the dead of night!—

This is Halloween, everybody make a scene!—

Trick or treat 'til your neighbour's gonna die of fright—

Black cats and goblins and broomsticks and ghosts,

Covens of witches with all of their hosts—

Trick or treat!—trick or treat!—smell my feet!—

Dear Lord, give me something good to eat

This Thursday, the Thirty-First of October, in the year

Two-Thousand Twenty-Four, great holiday of fear

Known as All Hallow’s Eve, de Los Muertos, Samhain,

Festival celebrative of cooks named herein:

This is my ode to you, ode to the scare!—

In living beloved, and to death I do dare!