Wild Man in Suburbia (#41)

When I was a boy, on Halloween,
Trick or treating meant bypassing
The authentic, haunted farm houses
Of my rural community, spaced

Unwalkable half miles distant,

Windows black as skull sockets,

Their spiderwebbed porches unlit,

Graveyard yards unwelcoming.

Instead, I was driven twenty five

Minutes to the nearest subdivision,

Brightly lit with festive windows,

Flickering flames of jack-o-lanterns,

Dropped off with friends to chaperone

Ourselves through the groomed streets,

Until our pumpkins overflowed with candy,

Or eight o’clock—whichever came first.

“Did you hear,” a passing kid warned,

Breathing hard, voice urgent

Behind an Incredible Hulk mask,

“There’s a wild man out tonight!”

A wild man! We turned to one another.

What could it mean? We never feared

The razor blades hidden within

Fresh apples, mostly because

We never received any apples.

Even blindfolded, we knew that the

Bowls of eyeballs were peeled grapes,

The swallowed goldfish, canned peaches.

But a wild man was something new,

Foreboding. We walked cautiously,

Clustered tight, nervous as costumed

Chickens, clucking our misgivings.

And so, when an hour later the wild man

Leaped, roaring from the shadows,

Rushing towards us, all I saw was

Horror, murder, death, darkness,

Halloween’s promise fulfilled, and I ran,

Losing my friends, my way, my mind,

Sprinting, if I could have, all the way home

To those sweetly haunted farm houses,

While behind me, my friends now
Undoubtedly slain, butchered into chunks,
The wild man raised gore-spattered claws,
Threw back his gruesome head, and howled.