With each new Midautumn, a dreary midnight
Begets ancient curses of great varied fright;
A thinning—a loophole—for God's misfit toys,
Manifesting some passage to spook girls and boys;
The cycles of seasons, the dice-rolls of stars
Align just precisely to bring the bizarre…
Come hither and hear now, hear the tale loud
Of the occasion on which we’ve found ourselves now:
Once every year on Halloween night,
Dark and dead things follow the light
On doorsteps, in butternuts with flickering flame,
They roam earthly streets in their wicked game;
From wretched nooks, horrid crannies of uncountable number,
Slime-ridden, forsaken, awakened from slumber,
These forgotten, disgraced, ghastly beings from beyond
Emerge from great depths, rankest cavern, coldest pond;
Unknown, clothed in shadow, half-beasts of murk
Seek secluded corners in which to lurk
And await soundly the coming of folk
To pounce and to prey on, to prod and to poke,
Creeping and crawling in pursuit of fright,
Leaping and lolling in frivolous delight;
Endless, nameless, infamous, revered
In ritual—though, of course, most merely feared—
They are many, many-clawed, many-toothed, many-eyed
Legions of both barely living and died!—
Hide away, dear children, from dread Mr Hyde!—
And hunchbacks and hounds of horrendous hides…
Or ghoulish green goblinlike gargoyle grinches…
Or even phantasmagoric fearful freak finches…
A toad with a song that over gardens lingers,
A wasteland full of zombies with salad for fingers,
A trickster, a fiend, a dream-dwelling demon
One-eyeballed oddball beside blue behemoth,
Funky forms of flesh that gurgle and shout,
Transylvanian terrors that twist all about,
Rulers of everything, bangers that mash,
Gorgons and gremlins and corned creeps and hash,
Jinkies and juices and hissing hogs of grass,
Jeepers and jolly old woodsmen with class,
Coral-lined creatures locked in a loch,
Needles and beetles and sisters that mock,
Nobles of pumpkin and crimson and lich,
Undying gastropod, flying jellyfish
Crying tears that blaze into hellish white stars
To the sons of Saturn and spiders from Mars
And devouring titans that snap, crackle, pop
Like the thrillers of Michael—torture, dance, stab, and chop—
Moonwalking boogeymen that bug in pitch black;
On dark-side dunes, lurk Lord, worm Arrak,
Cracking release and daft poison brew,
Misty mountain smog, seafoam's call-lull to lieu:
Old Gods made of orators' hearts for above,
For the blackening skies, the fowl void loved,
Beating and squeaking like bruises and boots,
Nevermore to bear any outsider's fruits,
Such as guys that are bad, and purple ones even,
Maneating Audreys, Lecters, spectres, and Stephen
Strange are things and people of this scheming sort
And hordes of similarly vile cohorts;
A wedlocked Johnny, a shimmering haunt
And Wendy goes running away now, how gaunt
To woodlands of beasties long left in longing want
Of a living dead girl or a harlequin jaunt—
Insane—left lying unwise—like a possum—
Penniless—laughing and killing is awesome,
Not a joke to a prince—of rats that fly rad,
Whether brawling in bedlam or voivode as Vlad,
Quit clowning and horsing with such lack of piety,
Get your head on straight, we live in a-nxiety
For the worrying and worshipping of things that go boom,
Exorcising through homes—holy things loom
And do battle with islanders or tormented teens
With weirding ways or warring warrens that seem not to scream
At ghosts and faces of skulls and death
That waited with bated Bates Bateman breath
'Til grisly ghouls all came from every tomb
From their humble abodes to seal your doom,
From black lagoon, outer space, his house in R'lyeh,
THINGS from families, swamps, Antarctica—
There's a monster approaching—it's right behind you!—
To the tune of Toccata and Fugue, Siouxsie Sioux,
Oingo and Boingo and Oogie and BOO!—
Something dooby-doo put a spell on you!—
It, Zim, Djinn, Shin Gojira, Yokai, Kali, Kodama, Crowley,
Biblical, burning, turning wheels chant, “Holy, holy, holy,”
Boxtroll, Bigfoot, Babadook, Beelzebub, Baldi, Billy, Mandy, Manticore,
Fellows of every Shape and size—ye olde spirits of yore:
Psychopompous Alebrije, Alux, Ouroboros, Leviathan, Jormungandr, Gengar,
Clovers in fields, polters in geists, “I’m sorry, Dave or Jon,
Memento Mori,” Xenomorph, Oni, Cenobite, Deadite, Davy Jones,
Necronomiconical, nightmarish, chimeric, crossbred crones,
Heroes of brine, alchemical Anubis, and Pie’s forgotten brothers,
Homes on hills and wisps and wills and close-encountered Others,
Ed’s Gein, Munson, Munch, Mothman, Momo, Mother Mother, monkey’s paw,
Rancid Rake, Ragnarok, RackaRacka, Raptor, Russian Sleep, oo-ee-oo-ah-ah,
Putrid plagues of pitiful prowling poorly-pieced Pazuzuesque Paimon,
1408, 237, 173, 731,
Jeff, Jason, Reaper, Ripper, Manson, Munster, Mothra,
Candyman, Krueger, Crypt Keeper of mummies most macabre,
Twilight Ghost, Witchbuster, Friendly Zone, Ghost Doctor,
Grim, grinning, gruesome, gloomy, goosebump-inducing gossamer,
Horror-haunted hollow-husks howl, "It's alive!"
Frankenweenie, Fazbear, wait with friends on the other side:
Spooky, scary, slender Skellingtons of Summerween,
Somebody's watching mean machines terminate times thirteen,
Sulking Slimer, Slappy, Sweeney, scissor sans hands,
I wanna get a job in a Rock N' Roll band!—
Went down to Georgia and Lavender Town,
Chigurh on Cramps backed by Scrooge in nightgown—
Hark! May Nosferatu strike ye down!—
Where the wild things are sure to invert your frown,
Like Scarecrow's soliloquies to tell in the dark:
Rosemary, Carrie, and Cujo that barks,
Cheshire Death Eaters, destroyers of worlds,
The damned, the bride, the goriest girls,
The rings and castles and corpses unfurl
A 24 hundred year old tale, it’s a whirl:
Hocus and pocus and locusts among us
Make satanic panic and evil death fungus—
An uncanny periphery in an eerie valley,
Of solemn Gollum-golems and ragdoll Sally—
Apophenic anomalies—Azathoth, Aragog, Alices—
Eek!—ooky irking pareidolic paralysis—
Button and glutton and marrow and barrel,
Tricks of the eye and chicks in feral peril
Of hags, dire straits in locked, shocked, licked, and shook quagmire gates
Of bogs, marshy, melancholy, mangled up and tangled up fates
In apocalyptic abyss of Tartarus foul,
Sinister scallywag’s scourge of insidious scowl
With gigantinormous jaws and hideous jowls
Or weary warlock of dragon, pen, howl,
Tower of terror, black mask, barren mansion,
Hooliganish, hooting, hairy homunculi dimension,
Peeks into powerful cultic codexes
With secrets of sorrowful grimy toad hexes,
Mysterious musings in creaking crevice of hall
And moaning and crooning at this year's winter ball,
Sickly, prickly, dear prudence of whining vines,
Weeping willows and thorns and horns of dank mines,
Ugly ugnaught, vaudeville voodoo, cheap chupacabras,
Frightful fae fly-lords cast away crazed candelabras,
Bermudan-Lemurian lost land of blind liger,
Jurassic jerks next to be bought by Bob Iger,
Bubbling, boiling, babbling brutes,
Troubling, toiling, travelling newts,
Wonky white-walkers, wistfully whistling,
Wacky white-maskers, worrisomely whispering,
Ethereal, otherworldly, ephemeral demiurge,
Oregonian, organ-guzzling, bone-crushing purge,
Strangling, mystical, mangy undead,
With sawed off and hacked up hanging-tree heads,
Scurrying critter-forms of moss-ridden coves
And surreal slither-swarms frolic in droves,
Leather-bound tomes filled with candy corn
And cider-based potions from a far farm, forlorn,
Cruel cauldrons of ill-willed villains, chilling,
Gruelling, coloured pills have one psychically squealing,
Sordid and squalid, scaly winged-serpent,
Unidentifiable missing link incident—pertinent,
Startling birds of prey, man-made crimes of the future,
By Ba’al’s esoteric societal sutures,
Seance in stinking patch with daggers of gold,
Incomprehensible apparition’s arcane agendas of old,
Croaking, cloaked figures in oak-forest grove,
Chomping, chimpish orcish chumps cooking kids on open stove,
Mischievous miscreant merrymaking, monkeyshining, hoodlum high-jinx,
Papal predator’s piracy, vow judged by black quartz sphinx,
Skull of a skeleton with a burning cigarette,
Cosmic, horrific, half-eaten, harbour-debt regret,
Day of the evil dead, werewolf by night,
Invisible man in bed, seen with sixth sense sight,
Hives of honk-hollering hook-handed hobgob-illusions
In catatonic, coughing, coffin-entombed confusion,
Disgusting, dumb, and dastardly, repulsive Rorschachian faiths,
Goopy, glowing globs of gut-wrenching, wrongful wraiths,
Revolting, ravenous revenant’s rightly wrought rib,
A little trolling, ogling ogre’s fallaciously riddled fib,
Megalomania or Megalovania or megalodon or venom,
Mountains of madness curiously carved, captured by Carl Denham
In the pines with the thing that sometimes wears Prada
In the pale moonlight, flooded with mud and bloody sonata—
Dreadful?—have courage you cowardly poor things,
Cabinets of curiosities and dark shadows don't sting…
"Don't hug me"?—come with us and you will see…
"I'm scared"?—behold at last the canyons of meat
Made of mythical monstrosities of legendary lanternlit lore
In this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad moor
Betwixt twin peaks where gravity falls slow,
Taken to a back room with brain, rotting, of Poe—
A quiet place for a chemical romance full of woe—
Lynched, erased from your head like Chihiro;
The last of us like Lugosi y tambien la Llorona
Lament lurid, languid Ligeti's Lux Aeterna
And leave a little lurch for lighthouse Lacrimosa
To ludovico Ludwig and the lilin to be loathsome;
Can't secure the wayward soul, straight out of luck;
Can't contain the graveyard gothic goo goo muck;
Can't protect the—wait, what's that!?—WAIT, WHAT THE F—
This is Halloween!—this is Halloween!—
Pumpkins scream in the dead of night!—
This is Halloween, everybody make a scene!—
Trick or treat 'til your neighbour's gonna die of fright—
Black cats and goblins and broomsticks and ghosts,
Covens of witches with all of their hosts—
Trick or treat!—trick or treat!—smell my feet!—
Dear Lord, give me something good to eat
This Thursday, the Thirty-First of October, in the year
Two-Thousand Twenty-Four, great holiday of fear
Known as All Hallow’s Eve, de Los Muertos, Samhain,
Festival celebrative of cooks named herein:
This is my ode to you, ode to the scare!—
In living beloved, and to death I do dare!
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,798 Reviews
Hello there, Lim here with a review!
I thought the concept of this poem was interesting, and I’m impressed just how many references to pop culture you’ve managed to fit in there. This seems to be an ode with a particularly broad scope: it’s about Halloween but it really goes about describing a huge range of media including some that I hadn’t thought of before as being connected to Halloween. But I guess you can really dress up as whoever and whatever you want at Halloween, so it makes sense! I like the thought that this poem could be interpreted as describing the world’s largest Halloween costume party, just as much as it could be an ode to horror media.
Something I liked a lot about your writing is your use of rhythm. The lines were enjoyable to read and you skillfully weaved in a lot of references.
I liked these lines both for the imagery and how the stressed and unstressed syllables pattern consistently within them - it’s very satisfying, the way you’ve used it here. The parallelism (repeating the structure ‘the X of Y’) also helps give these lines a distinct rhythm.
I like “rankest cavern, coldest pond” here again for the parallelism. Even though I probably didn’t catch every single reference in the poem, I still enjoyed the sound of the lines.
Something I noticed is that I didn’t feel I had a clear sense of who the speaker/narrator was. They clearly have opinions on various things, such as:
I felt like lines like these left me hanging because I was being presented with a point of view, but it wasn’t elaborated on and the poem simply moved on. I think that could still work if the point of the poem is to have a fun rhythm, but it might still be worth considering: Is there a bigger picture to what the speaker is saying? Do you want the speaker to have a clear identity and viewpoint?
A smaller comment:
I felt the dashes were a bit too abrupt of a transition between references here. I’d imagine there are other ways to incorporate “Don’t hug me I’m scared” without putting it in quotation marks, which to me kind of interrupts the flow? Similarly, I also felt the transition to the ‘This is Halloween’ reference was more abrupt than the rest, with the speaker screaming in all caps and seemingly being interrupted by someone else (but we’re not shown whom).
Meanwhile, another thing I liked in this poem is the imagery. I thought the imagery in the poem felt very dynamic, with all the action words you were using, such as in the lines following “These forgotten, disgraced, ghastly beings . . . “. They “emerge”, “seek”, “await” and then “pounce”, which paints a specific picture in my head. I also liked how you described the figures and the settings. For instance:
These lines not only read very naturally, but the images are clear: the undead walking through a lit-up street during Halloween. And the “flickering flame” especially is a nice touch.
Overall, I thought this poem seemed pretty polished. It kind of makes sense as a children’s rhyme as you mentioned in the comments (though I’m not sure a children’s poem would have the almost-F-bomb in the ‘This is Halloween’ quote ^^’). As mentioned, I thought the rhythm and sound devices worked really well and made the poem enjoyable to read. My main feedback if you’re looking to revise this one would be to go over the transitions between references that maybe seem like they could be smoother, and perhaps consider if there’s a bigger story to tell about the speaker(s) that can help make the framing of the poem clearer. That being said, I think there’s a lot of strong points in the poem as it is and the ‘bones’ of the imagery and word choices seem solid.
Hope this helps and keep writing!
-Lim
Hello there, human! I'm reviewing using the YWS S'more Method today!
Shalt we commence with the scary S’more?
Top Graham Cracker - This poem speaks of all ghoulish, nightmarish creatures that lurk in the shadows, waiting to pounce and strike. The official Halloween day may be gone, but not in our hearts, to which it brings delight.
Slightly Burnt Marshmallow - I personally have no recommendations to make as if right now, but if you wish to edit it, then you can.
Chocolate Bar - I loved all of the different references you put in there and how you somehow seamlessly weaved them together! I saw some of the things that I’m interested in, like Goosebumps, Stephen King, FNAF, The Nightmare Before Christmas, old horror movies, and if I’m not mistaken…Creepypasta? (That’s what the Jeff reference was about, right? Jeff the killer? If not, then you can correct me.) I also liked the wording of the poem, it read like a spooky little thing you’d read to children before bed, something that would scare them and yet interest them at the same time.
Closing Graham Cracker - An appropriate poem for Halloween, I in fact, miss it already. By the way this is written, I can tell that you spent a long time making this poem and I applaud your creativity. May the frights be with you and…
I wish you a marvelous day/night! :>
Thank you! This comment made me smile... first person to point out any references; and yes, I speak there of the Killer. Also, it was indeed intended to come across as a sort of children's rhyme, and it took me about a day and a half to complete.
Well, the effort certainly shows! Your hard work paid off. :>