Party at Culdesac Manor

There was a party
For Samhain.
at Cul-de-sac Manor…

The bonfire had been long awaited.
It’s shadows and eerie jumping light
had been the desire
Of the older residents of the house
In whose back yard it raged.

The dancing flames and crackling speech
Gave voice to the ghosts
Whose whispers had
Peeled the paint from the porch
And fogged up the windows for a hundred years...

And the mansion stood alone,
its tall form yawning
Like the maw of a lonesome giant
as the heart of its darkness
Now lit
Spread the smoke of its black desire
For miles and miles around.

The garden goblins danced, their inky bodies
Intertwined and writhing
The resident bogeyman played the drums
The closet skeletons picked at guitar strings
With fleshless phalanges
And the dead celebrated a celebration
A century in the making...

While the living stood among them,
Unknowing. Blind to that they chose
Not to see.

Inside the house, doors opened
one by one
As the mist of the bedrooms’ inhabitants
Awoke,
one by one
From their restless slumbers

And the abandoned living room fireplace
Burst into eerie green flame
Its warmth not quite quelling the chill
Of the frost from a hundred dead witches’ breaths

Breathing once again

The strangeness of the night came alive
In its own incarnation
Of naked tree branches and flying, curled-up leaves
And cirrus clouds across the moon
Whose face had changed some how...

And the backyard bonfire leaped and soared and consumed
the air the living breathed
And exhaled the twisted magic
That only the waking dead could see.

At the party at Cul-de-sac Manor.

- By Heather Killough-Walden