(image by artist and photographer Nick Dormand)

Either arrived
from its mess and hurried away, or sauntered
to this eviscerated demise,

so the signs on that
end-of-October beach – DO NOT WALK HERE TODAY –
were ignored in a dark reverie:

oh festivity / oh
appropriation – is Christmas too long a wait?
Autumn is the Fall as well,

and if climate
can change, so too this celebration
of deaths.

(A beachcomber
was carrying a pumpkin until it exploded,
perhaps.)