It’s Halloween; let’s light the cauldron. Shakespeare’s weird sisters, when making their hell-broth, tossed in “Eye of newt and toe of frog, / Wool of bat and tongue of dog”—and, as my young daughter likes to say, “Hey, that rhymes.” Let’s toss in some poems (or poem-like things): none rhyming, all unsettling. Two lines from Berryman will guide us: “Convince the stranger: none of us is well. / We must travel in the direction of our fear.”
First ingredient: The opening of Zachary Schomburg’s “The Monster Hour”:
On the Monster Hour, there was this monster that used to come out and try to kill everybody in the audience. No one expected it, not even the producers who were told by the monster he would play a few blues tunes on the piano. The monster apologized after each show and asked for another chance. I’m planning on telling a few jokes this time he would say. But time after time he’d break his word and try to kill everybody.
Second ingredient: The eight lines that Keats scrawled in his manuscript of The Cap and Bells (and about which Mary Ruefle writes, “Surely there is no greater accusatory poem in existence”):
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
Third ingredient: Lydia Davis’s “The Mother”:
The girl wrote a story. “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her mother. The girl dug a large hole and went to sleep in it. “But how much better if you slept forever,” said her mother.
Final ingredient: The end of Catherine Wing’s “The Evil Hypnotist Plans His Next Session”:
You are an old pickle jar
being filled with bacon grease.
A head full of dust, crumbs on a table.
You will be disposed of with a crumber.
Be still.
You are a hull of the unseaworthy.
You are the husk of the cicada,
the shell the snail abandons.
You are the bed of a stream
that’s lost to drought.
Imagine, please.
A sandbag with a hole in it.
A slow leak.
A water balloon come undone,
empty and nothing until
you are dead.
You are dead.