Stone Soup Croutons, 10-25-23: Ghosts Hear Own Stories to Sleep

Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions selected from Stone Soup Poetry's open mic readers and features. I figure out a title (and sometimes the rest of the poem) later. You can read the other ones I've done since 2015 here.

 

I also have a book collecting the best of my first year of poems. Click here to purchase it.

Ryk McIntyre brought Halloween early to Stone Soup Poetry. It was a night of ghost stories, references to death, horror puns and language poetry. Scary stuff. 

 

Halloween hits different when you're older. I'll still be binge watching slasher movies, but the days leading up to Halloween will be tame like this poem. Hope Ryk appreciates it a quarter as much as I appreciate someone who knows how to spin modern ghost tales.

 

Thanks for reading.

Ghosts Tell Their Own Stories to Sleep

Halloween, dead want bed, goths

and cutters beat to bloody punch. 

 

Trick is to make gravedancers  

think you care, not go digging.

Reading word death while 

squinting, it says enough.

 

Hell doesn't take any holidays 

because Hell is hell enough 

without planing weeks and weeks

to pretend you're alive elsewhere.

Crab apple on cemetery's tree

rots just as much as home fruit. 

Lizzie taught us to shut up until

any interrogators rise and leave.

All death is boring, no difference

between a witch and a Karen.

 

 

Special thanks to Rita Rose, Navah The Buddaphliii, Bil Lewis, Nancy Dodson, C.C. Arshagra, Jon Wesick, Carol Weston, Robert Fleming, Bryan Franco, Jason Wright, Theresa Rose-Jertson and special feature Ryk McIntyre.