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Approaching Halloween

“You live in the same kind of grayness as the filthy stuff that formed you.” —Jack Finney, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers

They’re here! like werewolves roaming round our urban neighborhoods,
attacking godly individuals and looting goods,
not trick-or-treating, only feeding in a frenzied mode,
vampires on the prowl for those who love life’s overload.
 
They’re here! like clowns in makeup, k-cup, caked-on flaky grime,
in hopes of shocking, mocking, and defrocking the sublime,
like zombies, those undead, corporeal, crazed parasites,
those carriers of pathogens, who dominate our nights.
 
They’re here! those aliens whose seed-pods dropped into our homes,
to take us over with their blank and vapid monotones.
With deadly drugs they cross the land in lawless, wild band;
and ominously kill and rape their victims on command.
 
They’re here! those horrid, torrid ogres, everywhere one goes,
those crying cats and monster drummers pounding out their shows,
those mental blasters blanking out our minds with filth and rot,
those gross and vile creatures of lagoon and seaside grot.
 
They’re here! like those demonic rats who linger near the swamp,
who swarm about with harmful shout, in circumstance and pomp.
Is there no piper to relieve us of their frothing mouths?
no trumpeter to blast them back to uncouth hell’s foul drouth?

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Bruce Dale Wise is a poet currently residing in Texas. 

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11 Responses

  1. David Watt

    Bruce, I really enjoyed the intensity of this piece. The refrain of “They’re here!”really hammers the horror home. Well done.

    Reply
    • BDW

      The reality of the intensity Mr. Watt refers to belies a weakness seen in the Polish phrase “not my monkeys, not my circus”, when every day one has to face such cruel idiocy on display; and why my studies of eastern European, Russian, and Chinese literatures of the 20th century have been so valuable in dealing with this headlong drive to insanity in America, etc. Mr. Watt’s handling of a comparable stance, as in “Unfit for Purpose”, draws the anxiety down with a subtle use of humour.

      Though my close reading of PostModernist American writer Jack Finney (1911-1995) is limited, I condensed the refrain “They’re here!” from the fervent pleadings of Dr. Miles Bernell (Kevin McCarthy) at the conclusion of the 1956 film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, where a mindless, horrifying takeover of America, lacking natural human emotion, was posited with convincing passion.

      Reply
  2. Joe Tessitore

    Bruce does indeed hammer the horror home with a necessary and a welcome intensity.
    God bless him who has been given an eye to see and doesn’t hesitate to tell us what it encompasses.

    Reply
    • BDW

      JT
      by Dic Asburee Wel

      He tears his tessellations from the tapestry of time,
      condensed in rubricks of the Bible, metrick flecks, and rhyme.
      Like HD, he prefers the miniature, the lanky, terse,
      but, unlike her, he keeps away from polishing free verse.
      He follows imagistes in emphasizing clarity,
      while striving aft a kind of New York City verity.
      He likes the limerick, haiku, and couplets, frisky, clean;
      and like Jack Sprat he likes no fat preferring crispy lean.
      His taste is Catholic, his topics, newsy, not diffuse,
      his verbal balance, steady, ready, heady and foot loose.

      Reply
  3. Jeff Eardley

    Bruce, I could almost hear the voice of Orson Welles as I read this wonderful piece. Very powerful and very, very scary. Thank you.

    Reply
    • BDW

      as per Educable Wires:

      Perhaps, because of his puckishness, as evidenced in his verse, and his sense of English áccent, Mr. Eardley, caught that histrionic quality of “Approaching Halloween”, a recent exploration, that works with the news bulletin, as Orson Welles (1915-1985) did so convincingly in “The War of the Worlds”, where the felt panic was an accurate reflection of the times; but which, however, I drew from Kevin McCarthy’s performance in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” of 1956, rather than that bemused, ironic, rough voice, used so well by Welles, with those relishing embellishments of his. That Mr. Eardley grasped the tone of this work is gratifying to an elder verbal craftsman.

      In some ways, this poem is inferior to a several-page-long guitar-song I wrote nearly half-a-century ago about this “Zoo”, using rhymed couplets in continually changing line-lengths. Here, however, the metaphors, though as serious as then (1973), reach deeper, and more desperately. Ever immersed in tragedy, it is difficult for me now to play as spritely as Mr. Eardley does in his clever narratives, or back as in the rhymes of “Zoo”.

      Reply
  4. Cheryl Corey

    The movie was on last night, and brought to mind the take-the-vax-or-else crowd’s herd mentality, and in the end, when Donald Sutherland emits that high-pitched scream – creeped me out! “gross and vile creatures of lagoon and seaside grot” my favorite line.

    Reply
    • BDW

      as per Caud Sewer Bile:

      As Ms. Corey most likely knows, the line “those gross and vile creatures of lagoon and seaside grot”, uses the literary form of grotto, and complements the mild alliteration of the palatal g with the unvoiced stop of k in creatures, echoing words throughout the poem.

      The use alliteration was mainly to emphasize the ugliness of the topic, and there was no conscious effort to draw out individual aspects of the theme with particular lines; but if I were to choose a line from “Approaching Halloween”, the final line for me is the most satisfying from an artistic point of view: “no trumpeter to blast them back to uncouth hell’s foul drouth?”

      Reply
  5. Margaret Coats

    A haunting evocation of the Halloween season, in which an ogreish evening is stretched out to weeks or even months of phantom preparation. What a great use of sounds in this poem! You included many social and political nightmares, and I suppose the commercial clowns are looming in the murky background. We are not quite done with candy and costume clearance sales, but today is La Dia de los Muertos. Requiescant in pace!

    Reply
    • BDW

      as per Waldeci Erebus:

      The overt alliteration of “Approaching Halloween” has similar vapid moments, as those found in Poe’s fortuitous, more fully developed, thematically different, and musical 108-lined “Raven”. As T. S. Eliot pointed out, “Several words in the poem seem to be inserted merely to fill out the line to the required measure, or for the same of a rhyme”.

      Unfortunately, as I suspect Ms. Coats understands, the “ogreish evening” discussed in this 20-lined poem has been decades in “phantom preparation”. The adduced werewolves, vampires, zombies, clowns, ogres, aliens, cats, vile creatures, and demonic rats invoked in “Approaching Halloween” have served well for describing this waking nightmare; for through them, one is able to discuss this horror with ironic freedom. Unfortunately, this situation lacks a Rattenfänger as that found in Hameln.

      Reply

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