2025 Halloween Poetry Challenge

[kreemi_pi]

It's funny now
that we dress in goblin and ghoul
and ponder if a sexy nurse costume
is the one we ought to do

we forget what it used to be
and what it used to mean
we just visit one another
and shout Trick or Treat

it used to bring us together
more than only friends or family
it was a night of fasting before a feast
once called All Hallow's Eve

we suffered one night
to bring joy the next day
breaking bread with loved ones
and welcoming angels who lost their way

For all the hallowed were welcome
we did not need to call them by name
It was All Hallow's Eve after all
and they were all welcome just the same

perhaps we no longer need angels
maybe we've learned to save ourselves
or did we instead get tired of waiting,
for someone to show us a true heaven or hell

as a simple man I don't have those answers
but it's fun to smile and welcome the night
with all the children coming to your door
with a hopeful gleam in their eyes

they dress as monsters and heroes
they come as maiden fair
they stomp up the stoop of your steps
and hope that you are there

and so we give them candy
so we offer a small treat
in hope that it's more than sugar
that it becomes a memory

because that's all we can do
from one season to the next
is want another one to come
and welcome its effect

That was really good Xeno

 

[Tzara]

Foraging
The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it.
—Sylvia Plath, “Kindness”

The long, fine line of her neck,
so pale in the icy moonlight,
that little flitter of her carotid

shivering under taut and flawless skin
inflames me, makes my canines ache
wanting to sink their eager cusps

into the rich sanguinary warmth.
How unfortunate, how wasteful
that I must needs drain that perfect body

and each lonely night seek another?

 

[kreemi_pi]

Foraging
The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it.
—Sylvia Plath, “Kindness”

The long, fine line of her neck,
so pale in the icy moonlight,
that little flitter of her carotid

shivering under taut and perfect skin
inflames me, makes my canines ache
wanting to sink their eager cusps

into the rich sanguinary warmth.
How unfortunate, how wasteful
that I must needs drain that perfect body

and each lonely night seek another?

Oh damn...that gave me quiver...

I think you might actually be a vampire lol, that went pretty deep into character

"That little flitter of her carotid"....mmmm

 

[_Land]

The Long Night of Samhain
by Bear Sage

°

The hill catches first.
Flame crawls the grass like language returning to its mouth.
Smoke leans into the sky, slow as breath rising from a grave.
The people gather in furs and wool,
their faces bright with heat and fear.
A circle forms. Bones lift.
The year folds in on itself, burning its own shadow for light.

°

Air thickens with marrow and harvest.
Apples split in the frost, sweet rot perfuming the night.
Cattle muscle through the smoke,
their hides painted with ash and prayer.
Children, masked in bark and horn,
move like wild saints among the embers,
offering grain to the wind.
Every spark carries a name.
Every name rises.

°

Across the ridge, the druids hum,
their chant a root beneath the noise of stars.
The world shivers. The veil thins.
It is the hour when ancestors borrow our tongues.
When breath tastes of soil and blood remembers its first season.

°

Then Rome. Banners. Bells.
A translation of the sacred into obedience.
Torches to candles, fires to altars.
The word holy stitched over every hunger.
Still, the wind keeps its secrets,
curling Gaelic around the steeple,
dragging the scent of peat and bone through every pew.

°

Centuries wander. The ritual crosses water.
Ships drag the story west,
salt on the deck, ghosts in the hold.
In Salem, judgment wears a petticoat.
In the delta, drums teach the dead to dance.
In the hollers, mist drips from black oaks
like oil from the hands of old gods.
Everywhere, the dead wait for their cue.

°

Turnips become pumpkins,
their hollowed hearts filled with trembling suns.
Children sing at strangers’ doors,
trading sugar for safety,
innocence for the right to cross through fear and back again.
Porch by porch, the ancient rite reshapes itself,
plastic bones for real ones,
yet the fire beneath the costume never dies.

°

Now the electric hum of streetlights.
Masks of vinyl and paint.
Leaves spiral like lost tongues.
A thousand porches glitter with counterfeit stars.
Still, something older walks between them,
barefoot, bone-lit, patient.
You feel it when the wind stops mid-note,
when your candle shivers as if recalling the first fire.

°

This is not a night of ghosts.
It is a night of inheritance.
A pulse moving through centuries of soil,
through jack-o'-lantern grin and ash pit.
The earth wears its dead as memory.
The sky holds its silence like a vow.

°

Light your fire.
Taste the year collapsing on your tongue.
The harvest, the hunger, the heat,
all of it one long breath.
The veil lifts.
You are seen.
You are remembered.
You are burning in the oldest light.

 

[Tzara]

Unaussprechlichen Kulten

They gather, well after midnight,
among the fallen stones of a ruined church
to chant lines in a guttural tongue

and sway as if entranced by the thick clouds
of incense burning on the altar.
Their priest ascends the steps, a thin knife

gleaming in his hands. His acolyte,
two steps behind, holds the ceremonial bowl
inscribed with angular, runic figures.

All fall silent as the celebrant kneels.
From behind a curtain enters a young man,
slim yet strong, holding a bound lamb.

Next, a young woman clad in a black cape,
followed by a matron bearing a child in arms.
As the three stand before the altar,

an expectant murmur rises from the crowd,
and the priest, supplicant to their ancient god,
prays to be shown which sacrifice

might best appease the enigmatic deity.

 

[Angeline]

Sum of Her Parts

I'm not like some Raggedy Ann
with a heart pasted on my hips
and I wasn't made with a plan

for sweet love to escape my lips.
I'm made whole of discarded parts.
I'm cobbled together in bits,

rescued from graves, tossed on carts
to stitch up a foul monster's bride
and serve a foul doctor's black arts.

When I first saw Frank how I cried;
my lightning bolt flashed and I screamed,
newly alive though I'd died

over and over I'd dreamed
of eternal peace but I'm bound
to one made like me, sewn and seamed,

born from the same graveyard ground
and dead to cognition or hope.
O pray leave us where we were found,
dead to cognition and hope.

 

[Tzara]

Les Yeux Sans Visage

Her features, smooth as polished stone,
still as a pond frozen white
in the ice of winter.

What emotion can we possibly read
in those lonely eyes, isles
of misery in becalmed seas?

Would another's face, however beautiful,
revivify her gaze, or would
the stolen visage wither

like a failed crop sown on depleted soil?
Should she instead ask her father,
her surgeon, to cut even more deeply

so that she could simply, finally sleep?

 

[Angeline]

SmilingLez, grazie mille for this challenge thread that has so inspired me and others. I was in a slump and this thread kick-started me. Not sure what I'll do next week when we hit November lol but this has been great.

 

[SmilingLez]

SmilingLez, grazie mille for this challenge thread that has so inspired me and others. I was in a slump and this thread kick-started me. Not sure what I'll do next week when we hit November lol but this has been great.

I was thinking November's poetry challenge should be "Ode to the Turkey" .

 

[Angeline]

I was thinking November's poetry challenge should be "Ode to the Turkey" .

It's a great idea! Maybe consider opening the topic up some (like poems about thanks or gratitude) for folks who don't eat meat and/or don't live in the States.

 

[Tzara]

The Haunting

What could be so strange
about the house? The gnarled
trees, sickly and stunted
in the lumpy yard? the cracked
windowpanes? The peeling
paint? It has been uninhabited
for years—surely this is just neglect.

So too the odd sounds. The creaks
simply the normal settling,
the scritch and scuffle only
some few rodents to be expected
in an abode so long abandoned.

The weird chills, merely drafts;
the low shuddering moans, the wind.
Give a good handyman three weeks
and all will be snug, sealed, quiet.
What can possibly go wrong? This house
is a bargain, even an outright steal
in this hyperinflated market.

The deaths? Well, people die,
you know, even the young.
I wouldn't call them "unexplained"
at all. Just misfortune—bad luck.

 

[SmilingLez]

Glue on my fingers -
touchscreen ignoring my touch,
Halloween costume waits.

 

[_Land]

Ode to Hallowe’en Fair
By Bear Sage

Hark, the night doth creak awake,
’Neath copper moons and iron ache.
Brass wheels hum and chimneys sigh,
Goblins barter, witches buy.

°

Children sport in rags and grime,
Mockin’ saints and spendin’ time.
Jack o’ faces grin with flame,
Callin’ each lost soul by name.

°

Tinker’s bell rings thin and low,
Steam breath curls in lantern glow.
Rusted pipes sing ghostly tunes,
Gear-teeth bite at harvest moons.

°

Hear now the barkers, cracked and wild,
Peddlin’ curses sweet as child.
“Step ye up, step ye near!
Trade thy heart for a penny’s fear.”

°

The preacher’s clock hath struck too soon,
Ravens dine on preacher’s tune.
Harlots dance with clockwork knees,
Candles drip in time’s disease.

°

When morn creeps pale on rusted spire,
Ash and laughter drown the lyre.
All saints sleep in soot and gin,
Till Hallowe’en wakes once again.

 

[_Land]

The Quiet Hollow
By Bear Sage

They said the first one wandered off after dusk.
Kids do that, they said.
But the woods near the water tower had already gone strange.
Frogs stopped, the crickets fell out of rhythm,
and the air grew heavy with something that didn’t belong to weather.

By the second night, the sheriff’s lights
moved slow through the fog,
turning oak trunks into pale ghosts.
Men from the mill took shifts with rifles,
but nothing stirred except the wind,
and even it seemed to breathe around corners.

Parents began leaving bowls of candy on porches,
not for trick-or-treaters anymore,
for whatever was walking.
Children’s names were whispered instead of spoken,
as though sound itself might call the wrong thing home.

The third week, someone found the swing set
still moving before dawn.
Chains slick with dew, seat empty,
but the earth beneath was pressed down,
a perfect shape, small as trust.

The preacher said it was punishment,
but he stopped saying for what.
The dogs vanished next.
Then the power flickered out across the ridge.
No one fixed it.

By Halloween, the town looked half-erased.
Only the jack-o-lanterns burned,
their light too steady,
their faces wrong in the way a memory turns wrong.

And somewhere beyond the fields,
a child’s voice kept calling,
thin as wire,
asking if it could come back in.

 

[_Land]

The Needle and the Moon
By Bear Sage

Rain slicks Basin Street,
each drop a heartbeat for the dead.
Madame Celestine locks her door at twelve,
the dolls inside already whispering.

Glass jars line the shelves,
moss, hair, teeth,
names folded in paper,
each one breathing a little.

A man arrives, bourbon-soaked,
heart cracked like a jar without a lid.
“She left,” he says. “I want her to feel it.”
Celestine hums an old song of ache and payment.

A doll waits, blank face, soft skin.
She threads auburn hair through its crown,
whispers Amélie once,
and the candles bow low.

“Where does it hurt?” she asks.
He presses his chest.
The needle sinks,
metal kissing muslin.

Outside, thunder rolls its bones.
Inside, something unseen breathes twice.
The man leaves lighter.
The doll turns its head toward the rain.

A woman across the street
stumbles, clutching her ribs.
The moon reddens,
and Celestine smiles.

“Balance restored.”

 

[_Land]

The Procession of Shadows
By Bear Sage

The sun collapses.
Shadows rip free,
black smoke with teeth,
smeared across brick and fence,
climbing walls,
spilling into streets
like oil with a pulse.

Each one carries a blade
shaped from the marrow
of its host.
Each one drips
with the stench of deeds
we carved into others.

They circle,
jawbones grinding,
robes of soot and iron,
and point.
Always pointing.
Fingers crooked,
nails split open,
showing the heaps:

lies rotting in piles of tongue,
betrayals stacked like wet timber,
laughter sharpened into glass,
fists still imprinted on invisible faces.
All of it throbs,
a harvest dumped in ash.

A man claws his own skin
as his shadow drags him
through blood-slick dust.
A woman swallows her scream
until her throat bursts
and her voice becomes
a river of molten tar.

Shadows do not pause.
They do not look away.
They force the living husk
to kneel in front of its work.
Every crime breathes here.
Every cruelty grows teeth.
The air clogs with it,
thick as smoke inside lungs
that cannot stop burning.

Mine comes forward,
face split into a cavern of knives,
hand raised to the altar
of what I fed the world.
I walk into it.
The ground cracks under my weight.
The sky spills black rain.
This is the kingdom we build,
the inheritance of every act,
the crown carved from our own rot.