Her Patient Apprehension (All Hallows Eve)

The horror of the night.

I beheld the distant warning,
that cold and cruel heartbeat:
Halloween comes pouring
in a flood of red,
flashing like fervid faces in the street;
unconsecrated haunting,
pale through windows, pent with
freakish satyrs and a mischievous moon,
always a-marching
to the lighted pumpkin's drum,
mementos of October air
monitors in fear that onerous consortium;
a pallid human river
drifting like dreadful furrows
as poor and vice delivered by a ghost,
in partisan corners of the mind
All Hallows Eve now serves up this brutish host;
they wind on by in this imprisoned land
like stray pariahs
proper to the prey, trampled on
by ponderous paws,
ransomed all with feet of clay.
She gleans the glee of morbid woebegone,
in bloody haunt and glows
of human amplitude,
that fading light that's shallow as a whisper,
bearish czars a-mind now better left entombed;
knocking otherworldly entities,
murmurs tricks and treats adventurous in shade,
clatter of Horatio's skull,
endless flight of bat and bony colonnade;
crossed swords
and merciless grins in flight,
where the toothy jack-o’-lantern lives
Delilah pleads the horror of the night.