Revisionist Poetry – “The Attic of October” – Inherited Halloweens, v.4

Inheriting the Halloween relics,
we ascend into the dustened loft
where old boxes breathe their mildew hymns
and every lid seems sealed with midnight.

Within them lie the legacies of October:
faded masks with mouths fixed in dread,
papier-mâché phantoms gone yellow with age,
skeletal faces grinning through their decay
as if death itself had learned to decorate.

They wait there like buried things
not wholly willing to rest—
their hollow eyes drinking the lamplight,
their crooked smiles remembering
the cold astonishment of children
who once fled shrieking down the lane
while lanterns burned like captive souls
and the wind whispered through the dead leaves.

Each ornament is a small cursed talisman,
a charm against the dark
and an invitation to it.
Ghosts, goblins, witches, and bones
still cling to the air about them,
as though the years have not passed
but merely thickened into cobwebs.

And yet there is a terrible sweetness here:
the old delight of fear,
the delicious tremor of being startled
and surviving to laugh after.
For Halloween has always been
a bargain struck with shadows—
a night when terror is permitted
to wear the face of play.

So we lift these haunted things again
from their coffins of cardboard and string,
and set them in the windows once more,
where they may glare into the dark
and greet the passing night
like ancient things come home.