Halloween Trees (Ode To)

If you’re a scraggly-looking tree in an empty lot
and a workman comes along and sprays an orange “X”
on you, you’ve got to think it’s not a decoration
for Halloween but rather it’s an indication
that soon another workman will come with a chainsaw
and you’re going to be the victim of a slasher,
and you’re going to be the tree-in-an-empty-lot
equivalent of the babysitter who drinks beer
and takes the kids next door so she can have sex upstairs
and the actress who plays you won’t be in the sequel.

Sequels are never as good as the original
so you’ll always have that—the spray paint, the photograph,
the poetry, the chainsaw coming to cut you down—
whatever that is, whatever the empty lot is,
now it’s a photograph and it’s twenty lines of verse
and it’s a thing on whatever the internet is
so you’ll always have that, and you’ll always have me, too,
and anyone else who sees this, and we’ll have you, too,
trick-or-treating in your scraggly-looking tree costume
scaring us for real but it’s still fun on Halloween.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



The sequel to this post is:

Carnage Candy



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