Our Halloween

Razorblades inside the popcorn balls, LSD secreted in the

candy – here was the horror story on Halloween

back in the 60s where kids in white sheets and carrying

brown paper sacks more safely walked their neighbourhoods

without parents and in the certain hope of bulging bags filled with

a different kind of deadly.

                                            So much older and not there now,

I wonder at those same streets: escorts with guns

who might shoot anyone who doesn’t give because this is our

ritual; checking for messages on the inside of wrappers [like

calls to worship another god than ours]; strange scared faces at

curtains ignorant about years of these festivities and the dangers

we can imagine but at least call our own, or subliminals unlike

ours about sugar and the other sweet certainties of who we are.