Oh Jack O’ Lantern

1. Oh Jack O’ Lantern,

Jauntily Spying,

With your flickering, frightful eyes,

Flickering fright into the frosty night -

Overlooking towns and homes above the

Raving river, roving sly along the tracks,

Where trains howl hollow metal warnings,

Like those hollow warnings on your

Treacherous, blinkless brow -

Above your hull afire just inside.

2. Oh Jack O’ Lantern,

Mischievously jocund,

With your devious, ghastly smile, smiling on the

Passersby who shiver in your

Shimmering sight…

Who shiver in the solemn Autumn wind -

That shakes your frantic flame inside;

And bestirs your lucid effulgence to

Billow out bedraggled;

To bewilder and bewitch those spellbound

by the daunting,

The decadent dance so haunting;

Oh the depraved dementia doled!

The bestirring in my soul!

3. Oh Jack O’ Lantern,

Lavishing lunacy,

Silhouetting the site of the timid’s truancy,

By burning shadows looming long along

The silent, sullen streets;

Compelling those to quiver in the quaintness

That you lend,

Yet bestowing bedlam mutely on the

Stillness that you rend!

4. Oh Jack O’ Lantern,

Jarring night,

With your hideous, heinous hues hurled upon

My terrified eye,

And glowing ghostly light into the seething,

Sorrowed night,

Through translucent walls charred black within -

Like men -

You stir imaginings of hidden realms,

Rife with reeling souls,

Writhing like you feverish, famished flame -

Forlorn in life’s foray.

5. Oh Jack O’ Lantern,

Jesting - Jeering

You stir imaginings of waning worlds,

With wicked witches wafting through

A surreal sky

A surreal sky seducing sordid secrets

To be sired

In the graveyard wrought with goblins

Gloom;

And the catacombs subsumed by dreadful

Doom;

In macabre mausoleums marooned

With monsters moaning,

And titian tombs bequeathed with gremlins

Groaning!

6. Oh Jack O’ Lantern,

Under the naked moon so quiet,

With its luminous, lunar luster proffering

Portals to some other side,

And illuminating lonesome leaves,

Descending softly -

Serenely from the trees they cry

Sweeping down the barren

Sky at hand

Sweeping down the star-strewn

Sky beyond.

7. Oh Jack O’ Lantern,

Jostling fiery light unto the sleeping

House across the way -

Your cradled candle captivates -

With a grotesque, gruesome gleam -

The mesmerized, gazing eyes,

Of bold intrepid wanderers who

Curfew have denied,

Mesmerized eyes with wonder widened,

Scintillating eyes with horror shining,

Twinkling at your splendor - beguiling,

Reflecting grim and ghoulish antics,

I see your madness in their mirror!

In the burnished, iris gloss whose

Blackness bled,

And in the white with rivers

Streaming red!

8. Oh Jack O’ Lantern,

Zealous jailor of morbid morgues remote

From earthly moorings,

With your torrid, taboo dance -

You allure, entice, entrance,

And sear a star,

With your light bizzarre,

And to the breeze-swept trees a

Demon’s shadow give.

A subversive shadow straining,

Struggling and complaining,

A shadow in a stupor,

Distorting and contorting

Volatile and hostile and haughtily

Imploring

Those who his taunting, flaunting scour,

At the rusty, eerie toll of the

Marauding, midnight hour,

To in his chamber clamber,

Where they - entombed -

Will evanesce -

Forevermore.

Beheld adjacent to us

In this world -

Nevermore!

9. Oh Jack O’ Lantern,

Jittery - Jerking,

Lunging and with lewdness lurching,

Your vehement, vaulting, violent fire,

Invokes a pernicious and palpable ire!

Your voracious and vitriol conflagration,

Evokes a paralyzed consternation!

Your vaporous, venomous, villainous visage,

Diffuses volition to mere velleity,

You vanquish the vagabond heedlessly

Veering,

Banish him into a vortex - peering.

Deliver him unto vertigo - reeling.

10. Oh Jack O’ Lantern,

Judicious adjutant of sovereigns below,

A vespertine vestige of Niflheim - Hades;

And Plutonian spheres bereft and

Vacuous,

Save sectarians who fostered illusions

Insidious,

To lurid lies they became the prey

Cozened by cunning so

Seemingly harmless -

They fell astray!

11. Oh Jack O’ Lantern,

Sentient sphinx of the netherworld nigh,

You tell your tale of woe -

To all you hypnotize!

End