Halloween 2: Lighthead and Halloweenhead

Along with witches and monsters,  you can add spectres from America's virulently intolerant past. This is from Terrance Hayes' collection "Lighthead."

All the Way Live

Terrance Hayes

“Do all dudes have one big testicle and one little tiny one?”
Hieronymus asked, hiking up his poodle skirt as we staggered
Down Main Street in our getup of wigs and pink bonnets
The night we sprayed NEGROPHOBIA all over the statue of Robert
E. Lee guarding the county courthouse, a symbol of the bondage
We had spent all of our All-the-Way Lives trying to subvert.
Hieronymus’s thighs shimmered like the wings of a teenage
Cockroach beneath his skirt as a bullhorn of sheriff verbs
Like Stop! Freeze! and Fire! outlined us. The town was outraged:
The red-blooded farm boys, the red-eyed bookworms of Harvard,
The housewives and secretaries, even a few liberals hoorayed
When they put us on trial. We were still wearing our lady ward-
Robes, Hieronymus and me, with our rope burns bandaged
And our wigs tilted at the angle of trouble. Everyone was at war
With what it meant to be alive. That’s why we refused to be banished,
And why when they set us on fire, there was light at our core.


I've mentioned before that in poetry you get to keep the misreadings for your personal use: all the misinterpretations, autobiography and personal allusions enrich your reading. You just have to be careful to remember that this is something you've brought to the party, not the author's hidden intention. In that spirit, I give you Ryan Adams' "Halloweenhead."