with daybreak services and gravestone
visits during daylight hours
I imagine they work only in the dark
digging rectangular holes among hundreds
of other boxed and buried corpses
but it’s that once-a-month full moon
when one must flick off the bobcat’s lights
and dig by the dull glow of the night’s
candle that makes me wonder
if every spooky story read and
scary movie watched awakens
with each crunch of shovel into soil
and plop of dirt on its pile
does he stop to listen exhale a long
slow breath of fog into the walled
darkness and peer across
the endless rows of headstones
and hope a distant movement he sees
is merely a branch’s dancing shadow
and the hot breath on his neck is just
the machine catching its idling breath
or that sudden tap on the side window
of his cab is not worth turning to look at
because it must be something the wind
kicked up and threw at him
on this otherwise deathly still night
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