Minutes til Midnight

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I am watching my clock countdown the minutes until this 31st dwindles down to moments and memories.  There were a few memorable quirks to the day and the evening, I hope you can all say the same.  As the tomb shuts on this Hallow’s Eve, I draw a final breath of cinnamon stick candle wafting up from the scorched insides of gutted gourds, I gather the crinkled remains of candy skins in their bright coverings shriveled and torn, destined for the recycle bin, and take a long last look up and down the street as porch lights dim, jackos darken and light shows blink and die.  I sigh, shrug my shoulders, turn and close the door behind me.  The house goes dark and here I am at the keyboard…already thinking about Halloween 2018 – I wonder what that escapade will reveal?  So much to plan and plot and ply, as the season passes by…so quickly, much too quickly this year.  Thanks to all of you who stopped to look around this blog, more thanks to Countdown to Halloween for highlighting another great batch of blogs this year, always so much fun to see what others are up to.  I will poke through the leftover candy and ponder…mmmmm….Junior Mints! Rest In Peace Halloween 2017.  I will remember you fondly.

 

 

 

A Trick of the Eye, a Treat for the Soul

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For those of you awed by the odd…Haunters everywhere, a good night!

Whispered words of patience, tickling my ear

The summer crawl, the wait for fall

That highlight of the year

 

random scribbled drawings, and mundane seeming lists

will help devise a dark surprise

a Hallows Evening tryst

 

long preoccupation upon a nightmare scene

as yard or lot like canvas taut

transformed by grisly theme

 

silently I labor, and daily it unfolds

all to create fright filled landscape

the Haunters story told

 

months in preparation, at last the visions done

the lights the fog the folks agog

a play for old and young

 

hordes dwindle slowly with anticipation sated

I’m left with thoughts of greater plots

annually fated

 

I wouldn’t change a moment, or alter inclination

I’ll persevere, each hallowed year

In this haunters occupation.

Revise by A.E., September 2017

Mirth and Musings Part 18

Streetnight

Thursday nights.  My sister and I take a weekly nighttime walk round our neighborhoods during the Fall, we do this specially to see the decorations in yards and on porches.  These “spooky walks” serve to heighten our anticipation for Halloween, but they also create a wonderful shiver up the spine tingle that propels us one week to the next during September and October, even when décor and haunts are slow to emerge.  Our own imaginations are enough at these times, the usual sights and sounds of a suburban street transformed into intriguing murmurs of “malevolent mirth”.  Long shadows thrown from streetlamps and porch lights, the far-off sounds of garbled conversations or t.v.’s drifting from second story windows, creaking gates from indiscernible sources and erratic gusts blown through trimmed trees and banks of fallen leaves, pushed into swirls like slithering snakes across our path.  We encounter random “haunting” objects; a pumpkin on a porch awaiting its fiery grin, a lone shrouded figure hanging off a scraggy tree, or the odd string of orange lights wound haphazardly on rooftops or fence lines. Dogs bark and growl at imagined slights, cats slink along drives, undaunted and furtive.  We step quickly by the garages with opened doors and darkened interiors, and laugh nervously at a car door slamming shut in the distance.  We remark on the absence of folks out walking, the too quiet traffic on the roads and the general pervading stillness.  As though the whole neighborhood was blanketed in the anticipation we feel, and the sense of tethered thrill wasn’t just a flight of fancy but actual and waiting to be realized. Eventually we turn homewards and we whisper inspired plots and plans back and forth, heads twisting to continually observe our surroundings.  Our pace increasing along with the knowledge of time running down, elapsing steadily towards that night of madcap and mayhem, these walks the long breath drawn in, till the eventual exhale into Eve.

Bewitchment this 13th!

Spellz

Posting a bit of spellcraft to get you through this Friday the 13th – beware, bewitch and bedevil!

Lizard lung

Scent of skull

Serpents tongue

Shipwrecked hull

Toe of frog

Wool of bat

Zombie bog

Screeching cat

Adders fork

Siren scream

Vikings torc

Fiendish gleam

Witches tear

Mandrake wail

Crippling fear

Dragon scale

Belladonna

Monsters moan

Withered sigh 

Kidney stone

Ghastly cries

Wisdom tooth

Beedy eyes

Awful truth

Spectral trail

Flaxen hair

Ghostly wail

Piercing stare

Wormwood sliver

Genii gem

Canopic liver

Apple stem

 

Dream Deep

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 “Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.” H.P. Lovecraft

I was eight years old and out with my grandparents and parents and cousins beyond count, at one of the beaches on the west coast and grunion hunting…everyone running around the beach, dark, waves glowing and I remember sitting on the beach and suddenly waking up, soaking wet, because the tide had come in.