he who works on halloween
ghosts those who stay —
it's a dead man
running for his life,
smoking cigars,
hailing rides
as a ghost
who tricked his mind,
treating candies
like medicine
to finally heal his lifeall this time,
he played into his thoughts,
strained by the idea
of how love
and its strangeness
might become the messiah,
and the fact that he thought
she might be different
but the fact that she never wasit's the five star dream
that broke him in his nightmare
so thank god
halloween is over —
I am tired of playing
the devil's advocate
when he went to hell
while I tagged along
Explanation: When we think of "five star," we think of perfection or the ideal. Given this premise, we can have an initial assumption that the poem will talk about an ideal dream. The speaker begins, however, by ironically describing a dead man on halloween, conveying a double meaning in line 2; Either he scares those who stay in his life, or completely ignores them. This "dead man" is not literally dead. He appears to live an unhealthy lifestyle, mentally and physically (lines 3-11). In the second stanza, this dead man's lifestyle is attributed to how he saw love as a messiah (savior), only to be proven wrong (lines 12-20). This whole concept is what is being referred to as the ideal dream, that unfortunately, became a nightmare for the speaker. In this poem, the speaker can be an alter-ego, or a person narrating about someone in his/her life, where he played the devil's advocate in an already bad situation.
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a collection of poems
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are original works of Joaquin Arig