Halloween

by Christopher Salerno

You were a white cocoon shot through with gravel.
I was a knocked-down nest.
We are unassailable only insofar as we produce
in the end something beautiful.
Luna, outside are monsters in parked cars.
Not you. Not when I have just set my preferences
for the twenty-first century.
Ghost messages from the end of our tenure
tell me of more boredom. Here's an idea
someone had in a cemetery,
it's headstones flat and ordered:
to take careful steps, the way ghosts do
when they are starting to assemble.
Whatever lands one here—
I'm not lonely I'm happy
to be among so much denouement.