October 31st
Maybe a Halloween poem
is too easy, a piece of candy
to be unwrapped or thrown
into the pile. Days of orange
and black and all the comic
iconography of death- skulls
and bones and bloody axes,
ghosts and vampires, rats
and tombstones- our modern
take on waiting for our saints,
role-playing, escapism, and
a coded statement of faith,
play-acted to say that people
find their twisted ways back.
And we have nothing really
to be afraid of when it's all
just made up and extreme
and meant to get a reaction,
to rev our engines, to shock
our systems, to hurry our
hearts, and aren't we safe
when our transactions are
binary (trick or treat) and
really just ritualist exercises
in pre-determined outcomes.
But it wasn't long ago (though
all of history feels long ago)
that this night would have
been violent, people injured
and truly scared, property
stolen, damaged, set ablaze.
But not today, not today, not
on this date in which congress
is debating impeachment with
all their hyperbolic speeches,
and Twitter is banning political
ads while Facebook fills our
digital neighborhoods with a
cacophony of unchecked and
unrestrained rhetoric, and we
run our children through
active shooter drills, and to
stop the fires burning across
California, we are turning out
the lights, while our pockets
fill with storm warnings and
sponsored content and the lies
that troll-bots tell. All of this,
and the kids we would return
to across the promised veil
are walking up and down our
haunted streets, collecting
plastics and sugars in the cold
mist past the flapping wings
of campaign signs, drifting
with their faces hidden and
their open hands out, from
house light to house light and
delighting in all the fear that we,
their many parents, can create.
No comments:
Post a Comment