Tales of Trickery, (Early Morning, November 1st, 1959)
(the morning after Halloween)
Behold this carnage— the battle must have raged fierce,
the air thick with exploding water-balloonery and raw
launched-egg artillery (the storefronts and telephone poles
still bearing the tell-tale powder burns of dried splatters)
and pumpkins cannonballing out of the midnight sky to
pummel the pavement pulp-slick and slimey, littering
the streets with the shards of skulls eviscerated and oozing
their brains, that pithy orange, seedy syrup gore
congealing now, coagulating,
crusting…
Look here: a vacant triangular eye socket, cock-eyed and
flickerless now, gaping blind up from from the asphalt…
And over here in the ditch: its leering, gap-toothed jawbone
now a shriveled rind, but…
Looming in the morning mist in the middle of Merrick Square,
like some Trojan horse left by the recently departed forces of
occupation, sits the trophy: the annual, uprooted outhouse
(a two-holer deluxe this time) ripped from its roots, liberated
from the tyranny of its native soil (the captured flag) flaunted
as a dire warning for those who, next year, might still dare
to withhold the precious spoils
demanded in the soap-scrawled
war-cry painted across every
store front window:
Trick or treat!
