the haunted 10 and 24

we rode a haunted train with skeletons
hanging off the engine for what i
thought was fun. i
did not know i was alone i
turned to smile and share the season and. you
had a distant look in your eyes partway
unmoored. the other passengers i asked
for help but they. they were lifeless in their
seats moved only by a rumbling
on the rails a hand fallen down off the elbow
and. and. and an upturned forehead.

 somewhere behind us
the terrible sounds the. the wailing of the winds
the cracking of some glass or why. why. why the sky
was dark now the steam streaming past
the glass and my heartbeat bumping up against
the ceiling. a lonesome solitary feeling as we long since
left the station to nowhere headed
racing

ghost. tower bridge

Minutes before midnight we were passing through letters and numbers of roads. The harvest had grown thin with the moon, and the night was lit in pockets by neon-spelled vacancies between empty lots and service stations on the main thoroughfare. The fires of hell had been subdued by the fighters, and left a tinge of smoke to permeate the valley air. I hugged my sweatshirt close and listened to the engine of the truck as you brought her to speed. The tower bridge was in sight now, outlined by spotlights facing up to the sky. The river swirled quiet below in the dark, turning and churning and yearning for sea. We could not help but seeing a figure, taller than life and draped in unknown layers of cloth, standing in the middle of the street at the entrance to the bridge.  I looked at you and you looked at me. A chill came across our engines, as we thundered on by in the lowest of gears. The figure stood perfectly still. I tried to see who it might be and found myself looking into a void with no face and no name, and no resonance of life, none whatsoever! We both knew instinctively after passing, not to look back. I looked down at the body of water and saw some reflections of light in the water. The bridge underneath spoke out against the weight of us...thus had we crossed over.

fabric of a spell

Oh! how the world lived under a spell, she thought, sewing her children into the fabric to keep them all safe.

sing me a rueful old dirge

In America fear was bubbly again. All the creepy clowns were outlawed and nobody liked an incongruent affect anymore. The children were safe in their beds and Poltergeist was just a movie despite all indications to the contrary, the untimely deaths in subsequent years of several key players on the set. I was in the woods and came across a painted face, beckoning me from the shadows. He was smiling but not, shiny and hot, and had hospital scrubs for a clown suit. I followed him to a quaint house camouflaged by the moss, and inside I met others, none of whom spoke a single word. They served me venison and goose off the iron, flame-broiled with the world's animosity. Shriveled balloons were all about the dirty floor, and my feet were followed by the eyes of a cur beneath the table, with a dagger tail and long resting jaw. The scene had teeth. The food was outrageously good and the company so silent and modest. I felt ashamed for I was clothed in the fear of my culture, which made these good people recede to the margins. I thanked them prolifically large, then sang them a rueful old dirge. They applauded like grateful old mimes. My faced turned red as their smiles almost, and stayed that way somehow. My hair fell off my head in one lump into my hands, and my eyes widened as I looked at this wig. I looked around and before me at my empty plate, the utensils had grown twice the size or more. My hands went to grab them and that's when I saw my own hands had swelled up like balloons. The funny old woman with the green painted eyes, she drew out some plastic white gloves like the kind you see in the cartoons. She tenderly took my wrists while staring into my eyes, and pulled them over my hands. Some mangy children beneath the table had pulled off my shoes and replaced them with ones like the others. I got up to leave and tried to cry out but no words would escape from my mouth, and I honked and I bonked and puffed and huffed my way to the door of this godforsaken place. But someone tripped me or else I tripped on my silly fat shoes, and that guy with the cherry nose and beady eyes came and put me in a headlock. Out the corner of my eye I saw the hospital scrubs, lime green, being drawn over me where my clothing once was. That's when the face painters came - to finish me off.

the trembling vine

We are in the thick of October and stab the pumpkins repeatedly with knives after pulling them from the trembling vine. We light candles in memoriam and place them inside the hollowed out heads. Now we can see in the darkness the grotesque faces we carve upon them and smile. We bake their insides and salt and devour. Then we smash them in the streets just to hear the sound. Or let them die another death turning black by thanksgiving, like the teeth in our head eroded by sugars. Halloween. what a blast.

nightmare no.5

I was toward the top of a large apartment building coming out of a window grabbing hold of material cascading down to the ground, I was watching myself like a movie climbing down, it was dusk, I was many stories up when some husky woman threw her head of hair out a jaundiced square of light above me and I could not see her face, and began to cut away at the material with a large kitchen knife, vigorously, and then the whole scene shook and skipped like a film, and the next slide and the next, changing ever so slightly, keeping me alive for the film was no longer rolling. The tone was sepia and the mood was horror. I was hoping I would survive. The woman in the window turned into a jackal and beat it out of there; the moonlight fell over sepia, spilling blue and black into the monotony. The masonry was far from uniform. I was awakened by the  scene. So close to Halloween.

damn it feels good to be a monster

The monster was no longer under the bed. Or in the closet. The kid had invited it out to play, one day, and the monster cautiously approached, a bashful look on its face. They played cards and the monster excelled at Old Maid. The monster remembered its home in hell, where its parents used to play rummy and bridge at a small card table nestled in an eddy beside the Great River of Blood. The monster missed all the other monsters. He came from a large monster family. 

The kid looked straight at him and was not scared. He asked him all sorts of questions a kid might ask a monster, if he could stop screaming. A really nice kid for a human. Exceptional. Rare. The kid felt the same about the monster. The monster did not even have to change into a human or something less monstrous. He could show his true feelings and remain a monster. They could suck on bomb pops and jump off the garage into giant piles of leaves. He would teach the boy Scaring 101. Damn it felt good to be a monster.

K reads... 'candlelight transmissions'

Original poetry reading
by Katya
for you....