Revisionist Poetry – Shrouds over the Porchlight – (Darkness Approaching, v.3)

After the last “trick or treat” the lamps inhale and die;
porches become bier-topped stages, candy wrappers like confetti for the dead.
The moon wakes, a cadaverous lantern, rimmed with the frost of old graves,
and clouds draw their black shrouds close, stitching the sky shut.

Leaves rasp like paper from hymnals, skittering across wet stone;
laughter hangs, a varnished echo in a nave of empty doors.
Wind moves down the alleys like a chant in a ruined abbey,
turning shutters into throat-less mouths and hedges into dark reliquaries.

Doorways gape like mouths of crypts; steps are the ribs of some sleeping house.
In sleeping rooms, children clutch sugar as if it were talisman or bone —
their breath a small bell under quilts, the slow metronome of innocence.
Outside, the moon fingers the roofline with a blackened nail—precise, indifferent.

Night slips its keys into window-locks; curtains lift like faint, pale veils.
Something light as a moth and hungry as memory slips past the panes,
unbuttons the house of ordinary things, and slides its cold hands under pillows.
When morning crimsons the east it will find no neat footprints in the hedges—
only the quiet folding of cloaks and the dull clink of small, vanished things.
The moon, sated and solemn, tucks itself behind the last shawl of cloud and keeps its counse