Happy Halloween

…from my 16-year-old self. One of my favorite poems (at least one of the less embarrassing ones) unearthed in a box of random writing:

Remember

Grade school, Halloween. Daydreams
of impatient toe-tapping, note-passing school afternoons,
all colored red and brown and gold by tinted memory,
and the construction paper leaves
that crashed into rustling piles of fire.
We leapt in
again and again
delighted at the crash and crackle
of their papery flames.
Evening voices shrieked at
jack-o-lantern guts, elbow-deep in orange,
we chattered, ghost stories in our ears,
trick-or-treat spirit clutching us
since September.
And finally the day
our eyes full of candles, our bellies full of treats,
and our minds rattling with the chains
of the ghosts in the haunted house.
We knew then that nothing,
nothing at all in this whole huge world,
was to be as feared
as our own imaginations.
Those Halloween days, all crisp leaves and plaid school skirts,
banished all fears from our elementary heads.
But the haunted-house evenings
the dusk and the shadows,
full of porch lights and masked faces
gave us a new idea of what it was to fear.