2015 Trick or Treat Challenge Poems

[suzanne]

The 2015 trick or treat Challenge poems are here! For the guidelines, read here.

Official Word List:

absolute
armoire
arthritis
backbone
caramel
cartilage
carve
cemetery
chassis
cobwebs
coffin
confidential
confront
coral
creak/y
cremate
crows
degenerate
dust
exhume
faucet
fracture
frame
ghost
hammer
knife
laboratory
ligament
locked
marrow
metatarsal
moan
mushy
osseous
ossuary
pall
pelvis
phalangeal
pillow
poltergeist
privy
pumpkin
request
satin
sheet
shroud
sinew
skull
spine
striation
tibia
trunk
witch


Challenge Poems:

1. In and Out the Dusty Crypt-- Stagyrite

2. Avatar of Meme-- W.G.McLeod

3. Auschwitz Fog-- W.G.McLeod

4. Date Night-- Scotty

5. Our Daughter's Ghost-- UnkleBob

6. Mr. Rag-and-Bone-- Salli Shepherd

7. Exhumation-- PClem

8. Once Upon a Sculptor Sneery-- casket N orbit

9. Fissure-- Hare

10. We Go Deeper-- Josham

11. Mercy-- Mittens

12. Dreams in the Witch House-- Salli Shepherd

13. What’s in the closet?-- GreaterMandalaofUselessness

14. A closeted epistemology-- GreaterMandalaofUselessness

[suzanne]

In and Out the Dusty Crypt

Carve the cobwebs. Crush the crunchy roaches
and mushy slug-slime. Pound a pillowed plume
of dust into dead air. Suck in the darkness
like marrow from the bone. Approach the tomb,
unscrew the coffin. Brace yourself. Exhume.

Keep breathing. Pass from skull to crumbling backbone,
from tibia to metatarsal. Find
the index finger. Snap it, and get going!
Don't panic when the crows explode behind
and dead things moan. Get to the stairs, and climb!

[suzanne]

Options
scroll tints across
the sloped attic palls,
skull dents shadow where
the head hammers.
How to privy a better
confidential self
in a pixilated frame –
the motherboard cooks; the case
fans moan.
Enlarge the ligaments,
pulse up
the marrow to resize
tibias the size of trunks
all to shroud the mushy pelvis
and picked apart arm rest
that is
a habit. Confronted
and carved
from a squeaky wheeled mouse.
Screen striation
pulls at the seams
of him. Resolution
is too weak.
The creation fractures
under the weight of a sheet
draped over the real.
Degenerated and never able
to stand fully, the knife
maybe a better implement
to form new ids
and pillows a better angle
to rest them in.

[suzanne]

crows pick
through cremated
marrow dust strewed about
land where bones stalked baggy in death
camp wait
drying out their
season like wood to burn
exhumed from ligaments of stripes
and stars
ghost air is breathed
made cemetery in
our lungs a chassis of obit
prints toil
on our fingers
bent ossuaries clutch
last moans stroked among the grass blades
grown up
poltergeist cross
when withdrawn with a cough
at a tickles request they burn
a sheet
concentration
made mad by man occupied
in man

[suzanne]

Date Night

You thought our first frenzied date was great
what with the caramel, a silk sheet and pillow;
you could hardly wait for the second.

But my mind is an armoire with hidden compartments,
my body a laboratory with knife and hammer,
my heart a coffin of cartilage and cobwebs.

I had fun the second time too – pelvis, skull and spine.

[suzanne]

Our Daughter’s Ghost
comes in the body of an old man,
the father of a guy I knew in high school,
a real prick (the guy and the father).
The father had his throat carved with a knife
in a botched robbery two days before our graduation.

The poltergeist wears her old Winnie the Pooh
house slippers, lifts the neck to speak,
and moans through the sinews and ligaments,
gurgling a concoction of dust and osseous fragment.
My wife’s once red marrow hued hair turns
whiter with the dead man’s scream.

But my wife sits each night under porchlight,
of my old family’s homestead, the lights added
by my father and I one summer when I was ten
and he was older than the ghost.
She waits for the old haunt to creep from the cemetery;
his pall surrounds the house.

Why such an old man, the guilt sweeps
over her. To remind us of the youth I took.
She requests my forgiveness, requires it.
I never blamed you, I say as if to prove
how strong I am.

In the early hours of night,
the ghost tires of his haunt and rests
on the step of the porch, gazes through
the crawlspace toward a center pier,
as if taunt me. As if he knows
where I buried the knife.

[suzanne]

Here comes Mr. Rag-and-Bone, dressed in white,
skinny as a poker, with his hair all a-fright,
whistling a dirge through lips puckered narrow
in a long tube, perfect for sucking out your marrow.

Here comes Mr. Rag-and-Bone, carrying a sack
of cemetery treasure on his dusty old back,
his feet ticky-tocking like the dance of St. Vitus
as he hurries with the cure for your osteo-arthritis.

Here comes Mr. Rag-and-Bone, run for your life!
His left hand's a hammer, and his right one's a knife.
He doesn't like gizzards, he doesn't eat meat,
but he'll cut off all your fingers for a phalangeal treat.

Here comes Mr. Rag-and-Bone, patient as a crow.
Once a year, they let him up from somewhere down below.
He'll catch you in a cobweb, carve you like a rabbit
and extract your spine to satisfy his ossuary habit.

Here comes Mr. Rag-and Bone, even if you've died
he'll pick you from your coffin like a winkle, by and by.
Plane or train or racing car, no matter what the plan,
you can't avoid the kiss of the Rag-and-Bone man.

[suzanne]

This memory has become worn
as a bone shovel
under the boot of a gravedigger.
What I exhume is not what was
buried. Grit-channeled. Framed
in corpse-dust, fractured
and hammered. Still,

though cartiliage crumbles
and marrow's sucked
clean, sinew clings to dry
muscle, hews to backbone
that curves into her skull turned
three-quarters in profile. Flirt.

She called me
pumpkin,sweat
slicked, legs enwrapped
my hips and back and I believed,
walked my fingertips from her every
blunted knife-edge
vertebra to wide-flared pelvis.
I mistook her invitation, nothing more

than cheap porn,
played out
in a cemetery of condoms
and hope. They're cunts cum
ossuary, every one.
Cradle you, they will,
from womb, rock your bones
till they drop you
in a coffin.

[suzanne]

The sink, the faucet, that insect-running feeling
when pant-legs are moistened by sprinklers in the yard,
I can escape drowning from spray bubblers
that pop up from the ground, but what about the race
ants must ensue when indoor plumbing turns on them,
the porcelain-held water churning down the drain?
- - your sculptor's shadow, nanny, hissy in the rain.

The sun masks the rain. The rain masks the sun.
Both leak candy from burdened bags on Hallows Eve,
courtesy of subconsciousness, wrinkled, yet, young
till storms snuff out an inner light;
my jack-o'-lantern now grins from a trash bin.
An exoskeleton glow of the sun
slips away, nearly dripping, an outdoor
waxy sweat. How can I encroach
you, nanny? You hum off tune.
Ants march in and out of the
gutted pumpkin's grin.

Exhume the dead's mud-caked voice, nanny; I'm leaving
in a roar, a gnawed root til' the scream is screaming
impressions left like a crash flings one from a car.
An airborne Falcon's melted chassis overhead,
so, you didn't cremate your long dead mad sculptor
after all and he still can't drive. Look out!

I'm knuckling grass to ease up while sampling
vehicular-manslaughtered cilantro,
as the munchies go, not bad for a taste
of rubber. Neighbor Kate is dialing 911;
our neighbor, nanny, you know, the one I call "hon"?
We're in her garden. Never mind. Nanny,

your sculptor couldn't have been wearing a seatbelt.
Your dead sculptor involuntarily spinning
as one who's died on a web we've disturbed,
a pseudo-wiccan ritual for a sculptor,
nanny, you shake hands off of you with swinging hips.
He barks at me while you stand above claws,
a barbed-wire fence, as elastic as a breath's pause

as if you'll go to him instead of me.
Let's comb our cobs off and talk about jealousy:
one ripple through the web and I'm a mess;
the roar of his demise rips up your dress.
I'll have you know, nanny, I'll set up barriers - -
It's not your sculptor pawing us, it's the police!?
Naw, it's just Kate's boyfriend; I've socked him in his jaw.

The sun is down and the children are up and out
with their prominent eyes,
coyotes in the rain, mangy, like fur
coats doused in pasty diamonds for buttons.
Cool kid, don't stare, jump rope the leash of my neck chain,
entertainment and candy, thanks to my nanny,
you, nanny, only just you and me now
quickening a precipitation along
with our neighbor, kate, who's outdoors to protect children
and point at us when cops arrive.
Kate lights a smoke, puffy as the squirrel behind her
wagging tail as huffy as a butane lighter.

Patches of fur spiked along the backbones,
as if unnerved, is this really us, nanny,
in a race to get out of a downpour?
Mud, succulent, like caramel,
sticky when teeth are clenched, nanny, you're too silent;
we're at the marrow of where he's buried, aren't we?
The figurines in the dark, confidential,

fuh! Yes, I promise, the osseous expanse
of your sculptor and you contoured, I'll keep quietly warm
where minty hyssops are locked in striations
although trounced on year after year for his return,
a whiff of what runs fresh, a poltergeist of sheets
when waking to this anniversary. Kate drops
dead. Her figure carves out the ghost of your request

to risk the drip from wrists bled over his bones;
nanny, you witch, I part company with your flare.
Your sculptor's tomb, a Qauttrocento-like statue,
coyotes drop the pretense of human children
and trot away, nanny, maybe we should, too, drop
sinewed masks. Did your long dead sculptor sculpture you?

The faint glow of a looking glass sneezes.
I don't know what relief your sculptor has in hand
except what's evident to me: my throat;
please send him back to 1464 when friezes
were the rage, never mind you're a virgin,
nanny, I'm losing consciousness; sit on his skull!

[suzanne]

There’s not much more than takeaways and charity
shops now; a graveyard town, a cemetery for buried
industry. At Age Concern a single mother disciplines
her child, demands the infant leaves his socks on.
Hope is gone. Tight lipped, straight spined she stands
behind the pram and smacks each chubby hand
that flails towards a sock. A young girl could be
anyone’s, alone and locked in her own world, among
the drifting adults. She rummages through cobwebbed
cast-offs and exhumes a brown bear with one eye. I buy
a ghost grey sweater, washed and worn, with delicate
striations like a nestling ground dove, walk the High
Street and donate it to a charity that rescues children.
This is a place of phalangeal fractures, where punched
men punch back, sink their fists into the pillows
that are wives. The church lies where a dealer’s selling
skunk he grows at home. Its brickwork’s coral coloured
after rain, its roof lead stolen. And tarpaulin, storm
torn from its backbone battens, flaps like crows’
wings, beating black and hard against salvation.

[suzanne]

We choose the armoire for our latest fling.
Two skeletons, one closet. Did you bring
the knife, my love, to prise apart my jaws?
I want to feel my skull locked into yours.

We creak. Your metatarsal touches mine.
Phalangeal fingers flicker down my spine.
Your osseous extrusion, marrow-rich,
rattles in my pelvis as we twitch.

Obviously, we degenerate.
But there are bones that one ought not cremate.

[suzanne]

My fingers ghost the plump curves
of her cheeks; those rosy hills, now still.
I trace the soft bow of her lips, locked shut
and boarded up. I kneel beside her lifeless frame–
tomorrow’s dust– and moan her name.

Thank God for horrors she escaped: no hammer
bludgeoned in her head, no knife tore flesh,
her body offered back to Heaven whole; no skull
rebuilt or spine restored, no pelvis realigned; no cancer
in the marrow of her bones.

She went to death as sleep– cradled comfort,
rocking grave. She hardly struggled as I held her,
stroking back her satin hair, as I wept and forced
the pillow down over her face.

[suzanne]

Mother coughs and coughs, we fear she's dying, we think
she has a bone in her throat, she's leaking smoke

like a chimney choked with a clench of dry bones,
bunched up like mummy-fists: a dry possum or unwise crow,

somebody's murdered children, perhaps the burglar
we heard prowling once and never again. Our house is thick

with smoke. We ghost about in it, avoiding Mother, floorboards
that creak, slivers of darkness staring from cracks

between a door's pale lip and its socket. We can never rest
for fear of the ceiling leaking on our heads

like a faucet, with the gravid tock of an ancient clock,
its hands grinding backward toward all of history's midnights.

Our house is bone-white and pumpkin-round, its walls
are brittle and echo when we knock. Every stick of furniture

is draped in a sheet, a waltz of static ghosts, and the carpets
are mazy, patterned in blood-red and coral; they squelch--

inexplicably mushy-- as we wander up and down a mad twist
of passages, trying door after locked door, rattling

every handle until one gives, and we spill like milk into a nursery
populated by cobwebs and horrendous bug-eyed dolls.

In one corner, a vacant cradle fills us with dread
that its toothless, wicker maw might suck us in-- so we bolt

for the nearest hole, find ourselves teetering on the broken lip
of a stair which must have once spiralled into the abyss

like the mangled backbone of some long-dead behemoth.
Below, we glimpse a sliver of light-- and hope

nearly breaks us open. We leap, and do not shatter our skulls
on the pillow, which confronts us with the fact

that we are not ghosts, or smoke, or children.
Nor are we really a "we", and sleep again must wait in the dark

for this knowledge to settle in the room like dust, like the ash
of our Mother, who vanished up a chimney years ago.

[suzanne]

I breakfast on the cartilage of a crow,
and throw it up for lunch. It still tastes great.
I carve this on my knuckles: HATE and HATE.
What’s in my closet? You don’t want to know.

I snack on mushy slugs in caramel.
My pelvis dribbles poltergeists of lust.
My favourite drug’s cremated-kitten dust.
Don’t ask what’s in my closet. I won’t tell.

I hammer puppies kneecaps. I like mess.
My pillow’s packed with skulls and mashed-up newt.
I string lost children’s sinews on my lute.
What’s hiding in my closet? Can you guess?

Do nightmares lurk behind my closet doors?
I have no closet, fool. I live in yours.

[suzanne]

Knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Do you really hope to find the absolute
in this closet? An old plywood armoire
in which even the woodworm have arthritis?
I, who no longer have the backbone
for such games, prefer a caramel-
and-chocolate coating over the cartilage
of the universe. I see you lust to carve
a carnal swathe through the cemetery
of Being. Well go rock your own chassis,
mine is held together with cobwebs.

And did you mistake my old coffin
for a closet? The contents are confidential
either way. Now run along and confront
your silly mysteries. Scrape you knee against the coral
reef of appearance and see if something will creak
out from the mist like the gibbet of a cremated
philosopher. I am not the type who normally crows
over the cravings of necrophiles, their degenerate
dry-humping of graves, but good luck fucking dust.

Or tell me this: is anything ever truly exhumed?
I will not read the scrawl that pours from the faucet
of your pen; it seems designed to fracture
the hemispheres of my brain. This old frame
was not built for metaphysics. Perhaps there is a ghost
rattling around in your machine. So take a hammer
to the metal – that will shut it up. But not that knife.
Oh you’d love to slice it out, nail-gun it to the laboratory
wall, and enumerate its every last ethereal ligament.

And what is a coffin but a closet that’s locked
against the inevitable? You can suck the marrow
of existence, chew clean it’s metatarsals,
lick up its blood, but I predict that you will moan
when all within your mouth grows mushy.

See how this old plywood has taken on an osseous
sheen? Perhaps I should upgrade: a coffin to an ossuary.
What’s inside? Does your lust for answers never pall?
Let’s say it’s full of bones: palantine to pisiform, pelvis
to patella. Or let’s say it’s empty: the phalangeal
digits of your hand close once more on air: a pillow
fight with phantom cushions, no hidden poltergeist
to turn the cogs, no driver at the wheel, no one privy
to the celestial GPS, no magic-marker maps. Pumpkin

– may I call you pumpkin? – it seems that you request
to sleep beneath bed-sheets of the sheerest satin.
Oh you have such delicate skin. Yet what’s this sheet
you lie on now? You feel the linen chafe? That is a shroud,
my dear. The fine embroidery, hand-stitched from sinew.
And what’s beneath? Nothing. Nada. All empty as a skull.
No hidden hieroglyphs, no ding an sich, no secret spine.
All things change. All die. That’s it. We are not striations
on the surface of some sacred Source. A kick in the tibia
is a kick in the shins: no more. There’s nothing in the trunk.
You want magic? It’s Halloween tonight. Go ask a witch.