In the fall, All Hallows’ Eve,
I awake tasting my own blood -
thicker, stickier than dessert wine.
More like strawberry jam.
In my dream, my reward
trick-or-treating. An apple.
Bit into it, felt
the double-edged razor blade
hidden inside, cut
tongue and inner cheeks.
Nana warned me.
Sat straight up in bed,
coughed and spit 'til revived.
Not again.
Same dream came, haunted me,
year after year since I was ten.
Passed out, anew,
my boys camp counselor
whispers, “Are you asleep?”
The last I heard from him,
checking to see if we, in his cabin,
were all asleep, before he left
crushed in his careening car
on a “beer run” to town.
Dreams - the not so dearly departed -
dying violent, unexpected deaths,
including him, a kindly one.
A saint, recalled on All Saints’ Day.
It could have been worse.
No visits from the young man,
embraced in a choke 'cause of race.
No little girl abused by parents
'til she couldn’t cry anymore.
Put in a shopping cart –
discarded like litter.
No Brooklyn shopkeeper
body never found,
cut into pieces, scattered
over dumps in Kentucky.
All Soul’s Day, not yet.
More to come?
When the sun is done.
Dennis Hawkins is a 79-year-old New York City resident who learned to write poetry by absorbing tabloid headlines which fit Ezra Pound’s definition of poetry as language “charged with meaning.” After retiring a couple of years ago, after many years as a prosecutor and anti-corruption advisor, he revisited his first love – writing poetry. His poetry has been published in the NY Times – City Room, Password (a journal of very short poetry), New York: The Big Apple Chronicles, and included as the closing entry of the novel, Fallen Angel III.