Skeleton! and other Halloween poems

These are Halloween poems written by Michael R. Burch, including poems about skeletons, witches and other things that go bump in the night.

Thin Kin
by Michael R. Burch

Skeleton!
Tell us what you lack―
the ability to love,
your flesh so slack?

Will we frighten you,
grown as pale & unsound...
when we also haunt
the unhallowed ground?

These are Halloween poems by Michael R. Burch.

It's Halloween!

by Michael R. Burch

If evening falls

on graveyard walls

far softer than a sigh;

if shadows fly

moon-sickled skies,

while children toss their heads

uneasy in their beds,

beware the witch's eye!

If goblins loom

within the gloom

till playful pups grow terse;

if birds give up their verse

to comfort chicks they nurse,

while children dream weird dreams

of ugly, wiggly things,

beware the serpent's curse!

If spirits scream

in haunted dreams

while ancient sibyls rise

to plague nightmarish skies

one night without disguise,

as children toss about

uneasy, full of doubt,

beware the Devil's lies . . .

it's Halloween!

the witch

by michael r. burch

her fingers draw into claws

she cackles through rotting teeth ...

u ask “are there witches?” 

                                              pshaw! 

(yet she has my belief)

Ghost

by Michael R. Burch

White in the shadows

I see your face,

unbidden. Go, tell

Love it is commonplace;

Tell Regret it is not so rare.

Our love is not here

though you smile,

full of sedulous grace.

Lost in darkness, I fear

the past is our resting place.

The first vampire movie remains the scariest ― the 1922 Nosferatu.

Vampires
by Michael R. Burch

Vampires are such fragile creatures;
we dread the dark, but the light destroys them ...
sunlight, or a stake, or a cross―such common things.

Still, late at night, when the bat-like vampire sings,
we shrink from his voice.

Centuries have taught us:
in shadows danger lurks for those who stray,
and there the vampire bares his yellow fangs
and feels the ancient soul-tormenting pangs.
He has no choice.

We are his prey, plump and fragrant,
and if we pray to avoid him, he earnestly prays to find us ...
prays to some despotic hooded God
whose benediction is the humid blood
he lusts to taste.

Styx
by Michael R. Burch

Black waters,
deep and dark and still . . .
all men have passed this way,
or will.

Charon, the ferrymen who carried the dead across the River Styx to their eternal destination, has been portrayed by artists and poets as a vampiric figure.

Revenge of the Halloween Monsters
by Michael R. Burch

The Halloween monsters, incensed,
keep howling, and may be UNFENCED!!!
They’re angry that children with treats
keep throwing their trash IN THE STREETS!!!

You can check it out on your computer:
Google says, “Please don’t be a POLLUTER!!!”
The Halloween monsters agree,
so if you’re a litterbug, FLEE!!!

Kids, if you’d like more treats this year
and don’t want to cower in FEAR,
please make all the mean monsters happy,
and they’ll hand out sweet treats like they’re sappy!

So if you eat treats on the drag
and don't want huge monsters to nag,
please put all loose trash in your BAG!!!

If you recite the poem, get the kids to huddle up close, then yell the all-caps parts like you’re one of the unhappy monsters, and perhaps "goose" them as well. They'll get the message.

Contraire

by Michael R. Burch

for Kevin Roberts

Where there was nothing

but emptiness

and hollow chaos and despair,

I sought Her ...

finding only the darkness

and mournful silence

of the wind entangling her hair.

Yet her name was like prayer.

Now she is the vast

starry tinctures of emptiness

flickering everywhere

within me and about me.

Yes, she is the darkness,

and she is the silence

of twilight and the night air.

Yes, she is the chaos

and she is the madness

and they call her Contraire.

Siren Song

by Michael R. Burch

The Lorelei’s

soft cries

entreat mariners to "save" her ...

How can they resist

her seductive voice through the mist?

Soon she will savor

the flavor

of sweet human flesh.

Deliver Us ...

by Michael R. Burch

for my mother, Christine Ena Burch

The night is dark and scary ...

under your bed, or upon it.

That blazing light might be a star ...

or maybe the Final Comet. 

But two things are sure: your mother’s love

and your puppy’s kisses, doggonit!

the Horror
by Michael R. Burch

the Horror lurks inside our closets
the Horror hides beneath our beds
the Horror hisses ancient curses
the Horror whispers in our heads

the Horror tells us Death is coming
the Horror tells us there’s no hope
the Horror tells us “life” is futile
the Horror beckons, “there’s the Rope!”

Solicitation

by Michael R. Burch

He comes to me out of the shadows, acknowledging

my presence with a tip of his hat, always the gentleman,

and his eyes are on mine like a snake’s on a bird’s―

quizzical, mesmerizing.

He c***s his head as though something he heard intrigues him

(although I hear nothing) and he smiles, amusing himself at my expense;

his words are full of desire and loathing, and although I hear,

he says nothing that I understand.

The moon shines―maniacal, queer―as he takes my hand and whispers

Our time has come . . . and so we stroll together along the docks

where the sea sends things that wriggle and crawl

scurrying under rocks and boards.

Moonlight in great floods washes his pale face as he stares unseeing

into my eyes. He sighs, and the sound crawls slithering down my spine,

and my blood seems to pause at his touch as he caresses my face.

He unfastens my dress till the white lace shows, and my neck is bared.

His teeth are long, yellow and hard. His face is bearded and haggard.

A wolf howls in the distance. There are no wolves in New York. I gasp.

My blood is a trickle his wet tongue embraces. My heart races madly.

He likes it like that.

The Vampire's Spa Day Dream
by Michael R. Burch

O, to swim in vats of blood!
I wish I could, I wish I could!
O, 'twould be
so heavenly
to swim in lovely vats of blood!

The poem above was inspired by a Josh Parkinson depiction of Elizabeth Bathory up to her nostrils in the blood of her victims, with their skulls floating in the background.

Nevermore!
by Michael R. Burch

Nevermore! O, nevermore!
shall the haunts of the sea
―the swollen tide pools
and the dark, deserted shore―
mark her passing again.

And the salivating sea
shall never kiss her lips
nor caress her breasts and hips,
as she dreamt it did before,
once, lost within the uproar.

The waves will never rape her,
nor take her at their leisure;
the sea gulls shall not have her,
nor could she give them pleasure ...
She sleeps, forevermore!

She sleeps forevermore,
a virgin save to me
and her other lover,
who lurks now, safely smothered
by the restless, surging sea.

And, yes, they sleep together,
but never in that way ...
For the sea has stripped and shorn
the one I once adored,
and washed her flesh away.

He does not stroke her honey hair,
for she is bald, bald to the bone!
And how it fills my heart with glee
to hear them sometimes cursing me

out of the depths of the demon sea ...

their skeletal love―impossibility!

Dark Gothic
by Michael R. Burch

Her fingers are filed into talons;
she smiles with carnivorous teeth ...
You ask, “Are there vampires?”
― Get real! ―
(Yet she has my belief.)

Completing the Pattern
by Michael R. Burch

Walk with me now, among the transfixed dead
who kept life’s compact and who thus endure
harsh sentence here―among pink-petaled beds

and manicured green lawns. The sky’s azure,
pale blue once like their eyes, will gleam blood-red
at last when sunset staggers to the door
of each white mausoleum, to inquire―
What use, O things of erstwhile loveliness?

Reclamation
by Michael R. Burch

after Robert Graves, with a nod to Mary Shelley

I have come to the dark side of things
where the bat sings
its evasive radar
and Want is a crooked forefinger
attached to a gelatinous wing.

I have grown animate here, a stitched corpse
hooked to electrodes.
And night
moves upon me―progenitor of life

with its foul breath.

Blind eyes have their second sight
and still are deceived. Now my nature
is softly to moan
as Desire carries me
swooningly across her threshold.

Stone
is less infinite than her crone’s
gargantuan hooked nose, her driveling lips.
I eye her ecstatically―her dowager figure,

and there is something about her that my words transfigure

to a consuming emptiness.

We are at peace
with each other; this is our venture―
swaying, the strings tautening, as tightropes
tauten, as love tightens, constricts

to the first note.

Lyre of our hearts’ pits,
orchestration of nothing, adits
of emptiness! We have come to the last of our hopes,
sweet as congealed blood sweetens for flies.

Need is reborn; love dies.

Belfry
by Michael R. Burch

There are things we surrender
to the attic gloom:
they haunt us at night
with shrill, querulous voices.

There are choices we made
yet did not pursue,
behind windows we shuttered
then failed to remember.

There are canisters sealed
that we cannot reopen,
and others long broken
that nothing can heal.

There are things we conceal
that our anger dismembered,
gray leathery faces
the rafters reveal.

Duet
by Michael R. Burch

Oh, Wendy, by the firelight, how sad!
How worn and gray your auburn hair became!
You’re very silent, like an evening rain
that trembles on dark petals. Tears you’ve shed
for days we laughed together, glisten now;
your flesh became translucent; and your brow
knits, gathered loosely. By the well-made bed
three portraits hang with knowing eyes, beloved,
but mine is not among them. Time has proved
our hearts both strangely mortal. If I said
I loved you once, how is it that could change?
And yet I watch you fondly; love is strange . . .

Oh, Peter, by the firelight, how bright
my thought of you remains, and if I said
I loved you once, then took him to my bed,
I did it for the need of love, one night
when you were far away. My heart endured
transfigurement―in flaming ash inured

to heartbreak and the violence of sight:
I saw myself grow old and thin and frail
with thinning hair about me, like a veil . . .
And so I loved him for myself, despite
the love between us―our first startled kiss.

But then I loved him for his humanness.
And then we both grew old, and it was right . . .

Oh, Wendy, if I fly, I fly beyond
these human hearts, these cities walled and tiered
against the night, beyond this vale of tears,
for love, if it exists, dies with the years . . .

No, Peter, love is constant as the heart
that keeps till its last beat a measured pace
and sets the fixtures of its dreams in place
by beds at first well-used, at last well-made,
and counts each face a joy, each tear a grace . . .

Horror
by Michael R. Burch

What I ache to say is beyond saying―
no words for the horror
of not loving enough,
like a mummy half-wrapped in its moldering casements
holding a lily aloft.

No, there are no words for the horror
as a tormented wind howls through the teetering floes
and the cold freezes down to my clawed hairy toes ...

What use to me, now, if the stars appear?

As I moan
the moon finds me,
fangs goring the deer.

Strange Corps(e)
by Michael R. Burch

We are all dying, haunted by life―
dying, but the living will not let us go.
We are perishing zombies, haunted by the moonglow.

With what animation we, shuffling, return
nightly, to worry Love’s worm-eaten corpse,
till, living or dead, she is wholly ours.

We are the dying, enamored of “life”―
the palest of auras, the eeriest call.
We stagger to attention ... stumble ... fall.

We have only one thought―Love’s peculiar notion,

that our duty’s to “live,” though such “living” means
night’s horrific wild hungers, its stranger dreams.

We now “live” on the flesh of eroded dreams
and no longer recoil at the victims’ screams.

Love, ah! serene ghost
by Michael R. Burch

Love, ah! serene ghost,
haunts my retelling of her,
or stands atop despairing stairs
with such pale, severe eyes,
I become another pallid specter.

But what I feel
most profoundly is this:
the absolute lack of her kiss,
the absence of her wild,
unwarranted laughter.

So that,
like a candle deprived of oxygen,
I become mere wick and tallow again.
Here and hereafter ...
gone with her now, in the darkest of nights, the flame!

I lie, pallid vision of man―the same

wan ghost of her palpitations’ claim
on my heart
that I was before.
I love her beyond and despite even shame.

Ceremony
by Michael R. Burch

Lost in the cavernous blue silence of spring,
heavy-lidded and drowsy with slumber, I see
the dark gnats leap; the black flies fling
their slow, engorged bulks into the air above me.

Blue and green, shimmering hordes of bottleflies sing
their monotonous laments; as I listen, they near
with the strange droning hum of their damp, lustrous wings.

Though you said you would leave me, I prop you up here

and brush back red ants from your fine, tangled hair,
whispering, “I do!” . . . as the gaunt vultures stare.

Dark Twin
by Michael R. Burch

You come to me
out of the sun―
my dark twin, unreal . . .

And you are always near
although I cannot touch you;
although I trample you, you cannot feel . . .

And we cannot be parted,
nor can we ever meet
except at the feet.

Sometimes the Dead

by Michael R. Burch

Sometimes we catch them out of the corners of our eyes:

     the pale dead.

          After they have fled

the gourds of their bodies, like escaping fragrances they rise.

Once they have become a cloud’s mist, sometimes like the rain

     they descend;

they appear, sometimes silver like laughter,

to gladden the hearts of men.

Sometimes like a pale gray fog, they drift

     unencumbered, yet lumbrously,

          as if over the sea

there was the lightest vapor even Atlas could not lift.

Sometimes they haunt our dreams like forgotten melodies

     only half-remembered.

          Though they lie dismembered

in black catacombs, sepulchers and dismal graves; although they have committed felonies,

yet they are us. Someday soon we will meet them in the graveyard dust

     blood-engorged, but never sated

          since Cain slew Abel.

But until we become them, let us steadfastly forget them, even as we know our children must ...

The Wild Hunt
by Michael R. Burch

Our Halloween is an inheritance from the ancient Celts. The Celtic king Artur or Artos (“the Bear”) became our King Arthur, Bedwyr became Bedivere, etc.

Near Devon, the hunters appear in the sky
with Artur and Bedwyr sounding the call;
and the others, laughing, go dashing by.
They only appear when the moon is full:

Valerin, the King of the Tangled Wood,
and Valynt, the goodly King of Wales,
Gawain and Owain and the hearty men
who live on in many minstrels’ tales.

They seek the white stag on a moonlit moor,
or Torc Triath, the fabled boar,
or Ysgithyrwyn, or Twrch Trwyth,
the other mighty boars of myth.

They appear, sometimes, on Halloween
to chase the moon across the green,
then fade into the shadowed hills
where memory alone prevails.

Published by Celtic Twilight, Celtic Lifestyles, Boston Poetry and Auldwicce

Few legends have inspired more poetry than those of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. These legends have their roots in a far older Celtic mythology than many realize. Here the names are ancient and compelling. Artur or Artos (“the Bear”) becomes King Arthur. Bedwyr becomes Bedivere. Myrddin becomes Merlin. Lancelot is Llenlleawc, Llwch Lleminiawg or Lluch Llauynnauc. And there is an curious intermingling of Welsh and Irish names within these legends, indicating that some tales (and the names of the heroes and villains) were in all probability “borrowed” by one Celtic tribe from another. For instance, in the Welsh poem “Pa gur,” the Welsh Manawydan son of Llyr is clearly equivalent to the Irish Mannanan mac Lir.

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