When you are a child you are in touch with the old magic that rides the winds
in the month of October.

It's palpable, tangible, substantial in the air at night when the moon is 
full and darkness descends and the cool winds blow through the almost naked
trees clinging.

Often, you laid in your bed, blanket held high, tight just below your eyes, as you 
stared at the shadows dancing, tapping just outside your window creeping,
because every sound, every movement, outside or in, was more
ominous in the enchanting halls that you called the days of October.

From one to thirty-one you knew you marched certainly to your gleeful deaths 
under the blue shadowed sky cast by a vengeful moon that had nothing better to do than to spy on you as you tried to sleep a fitful sleep.  

As a child, you loved to fear, but feared to know the full extent that your fear could roam
and go, but roam you did. And Fear always got the best of you, wide eyes and all as
you ran to your Ma or Pa.

Secretly though, even consoled, you loved the tenseness of that feeling,
that soul reeling fright, the goosebumps crawling across your skin at night.

You relished that magic, that what-if of awfulness lurking.

Life was alive in you. Breathing  like a bellowed fired, and wanting to escape from that feeling was never a question truly ever posed
in the slightest. 


by Philip Wardlow ~ October 1st of 2021