For eight years,
He has come to mean Halloween
Outside our home,
As much, even, as the Rabbit or
That Jolly Tubby Man
Embody their Holidays
Most the year he spends hung in our garage,
Across on the wall from Blue Polyethylene Mary and a Joseph
With their swaddling baby, who it is foretold
Must suffer naked nights out in December’s cold
Then back in here for hot summers of cruelties too gruesome
To be mentioned in Dante’s annals of Hell
He’s a skeleton whose ghost is gone
Lynch like he swings from dusk to dawn
Upon a tree branch over our lawn
One yellowed tooth now lost and missing
Which the whistling wind makes hoot and hissing
As if possessed by owls and snakes in song From seven years’ October Suns
He’s discolored to a gray ash yellow,
As gone is the green night glow that he once shined
When was first purchased and was new,
His blinking eyes having both gone hollow
Since a leaky battery corroded his mind
These rank October days and Sun
Bleaching crisp his haggard bones, everyone,
While the desiccate wind scales him to bits
That mow and leaf rake will till in
What hallowed ground will take him in,
Not much longer until he’s gone
So lonely to hang with him here,
We had like zero kids last year,
My bones too have grown stiff and creak
My tendons ache, I’m sore and weak,
With him it’s all I can do to sigh
And mourn the season in a world
Where even skeletons must die
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