Tag: Halloween

Caswunnderland
for Jacob Snider

In the depths of my wishing well lies a new monster
who wears a mask made from the flesh of a friend
known famously strange as both the wolf
and the rabbit. A Mad Hatter, a Cas One
from another dimension, where every-
thing is nothing and unlike the truth.
Look into the Fake Jake’s eyes,
they appear to flash hues
yet to be created in
the place called home.
Of all the hip-hopsters alive,
why must this talent make cameos
in the most peculiar interludes sandwiched
between one cranial quadrant and the precious
stem which creates these random artistic projections?
These moments see no Chemical H collaboration
nor do they offer revelations about the future,
premonitions to help stop catastrophe from
entering into our temporary existence.
Instead of miniature cups of tea,
this imposter downs whiskey
and smacks the many asses
his female entourage
offer him before
departing to
give us
privacy.
Killer egos
make their presence
known with each laugh
as he points to his golden record
hanging on a wall; the game’s spoils.
Before telling me I’ve been home all along,
Cas peels back the seam from underneath the hat
towering carefully atop his grand caricature-sized head
and shows me while I stumble on a painted blonde disguised
as an ottoman with the finest details present on the arch of her back
that the only real monsters there are in this world are the ones hiding within.

©2021 Tim Heerdink All rights reserved.

Tim Heerdink is the author of The Human Remains (Bird Brain Publishing, 2019), Red Flag and Other Poems (Bird Brain Publishing, 2018), Razed Monuments (Finishing Line Press, 2020), Checking Tickets on Oumaumua (Midwest Writers Guild, 2021), Ghost Map (Between Shadows Press, 2021), Sailing on the Edge of Time, I Hear a Siren’s Call (Roaring Junior Press, 2021), (Between Shadows Press, 2021), Tabletop Anxieties & Sweet Decay (with Tony Brewer) (Roaring Junior Press, 2021), Somniloquy & Trauma in the Knottseau Well (Cajun Mutt Press, 2021), the novel, Last Lights of a Dying Sun (TBA), and short stories, “The Tithing of Man” and “HEA-VEN2”. Heerdink is president of the Midwest Writers Guild. He resides in Newburgh, Indiana with his wife, daughters, dog, and two cats.

Halloween Devices

Big and dark and full of wrong angles
Varying shades of blood and fear
The girl looked out with a blank expression
She had a red scarf pulled over her
Disappeared through the open doorway
Face our words in moonlit guises
Like Halloween devices the shadows
Negotiate her skin at the skyline
Her eyes as big as candy-glazed
Fruit and crazy like an organ player’s
Playing hopeless on the air like prayer
Breathing words, I am not you, she writes
All lights and mirrors I don’t know
So were any of those ageless
Realm of the meanings of things real?
What if this isn’t a mask?

Monster for Breakfast

She makes breakfast. The eggs are red.
Like something rusty. She chats at no-one.
The sleeping figure past the partition wakes.
The bacon cracks the pan. Biscuits, jam.

When the creature rises behind her
She is in shadow. She turns
And holds out a plate with a smile.
She has a look like secrets.

He is flesh-gum, sinister with rot
And maggots, trammeled bone
And misshapen skull and dead
Eyes round in tears. All those years.

Stephen King Is My Daddy

That old rock and roll boogeyman.
I’m jealous of the kids he kept.
He left me in a graveyard
In North Hollywood in 1986,
Behind a tombstone covered in moss,
During his promotional tour for
A book about dead kids.
I didn’t see the irony.

I was six. It was half-past midnight.
He left me with a finger-bone
That he said was good luck.
I stuck it in the corner of my mouth
Like Huck Finn would a piece of straw.

I never knew my mother.
I heard different explanations for her absence.
She was shanghaied onto a gunboat in China,
Pressed into service as a pirate.
She was repairing prosthetic limbs in Zaire,
Under the tutelage of an old watch-maker.
She leaped from The Eiffel Tower and was in
A French institution, recovering,
Twenty-two broken bones and a semi-serious
Opium addiction. She lost all her teeth
And then her tongue fell out too.

It was all true. Last I heard she
Was looking for some tower
And wasn’t even in this part
Of the space-time continuum.
I suppose it should mean something,
But it doesn’t.

I made time in the graveyard reading epitaphs.
I made up poems about people buried there.
Got hungry. I had to eat something other
Than the corpse-fed earthworms I fingered from the soil.
Though the worms weren’t bad. They tasted like skin.

The cemetary was so big I couldn’t
Find my way out, it covered half of Hollywood,
It was like a wilderness preserve, I mean, they kept wolves
There too, and a forest full of ghosts.

Dancing with zombies at night, sleeping
Underground. I had my first kiss with a walking
Skeleton. I’m still not sure if it was a boy or girl.
We’re still dating, all these years later. We communicate
Through a complicated series of jaw-clicks.

©2020 Adam Ai All rights reserved.

Adam Ai is a Puerto Rican and Basque poet, and U.S. Army veteran from Los Angeles, California. He has previously been published in Chiron Review, Kanstellation, Thorn Literary Magazine, Ninshar Arts, South Florida Poetry Journal, Art Times Journal, Ancient Paths Literary Magazine, Pink Plastic House, Abstract: Contemporary Expressions Magazine, The Pointed Circle, and Xenith. Connect with him on Twitter @AdamAiPoems.