In honor of Halloween, I thought I'd share an old poem I wrote.
This is my darkest poem, and has a lot of references to horror films,
including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part II, Poltergeist, The Fly, Stephen King's It,
and Rosemary's Baby. I analyze the meaning of it afterwards, but suffice
to say that, at the time I wrote it, I was hurting, and not only did people seem
oblivious to my pain, but were still sometimes even vindictive, and, as is sometimes
the case, some people seemed to live on fear, not only causing fear, but
getting some sort of satisfaction from it, and actually deriving some kind of
weird pleasure from causing it. Some people are just like that.
Fear
by Gary Van Buren
They live
on fear!
They
live on fear!
They
live on fear!
They
live on fear!
Be
afraid
Theeeey're
Heeeeere!
Be very
afraid
They
live on fear!
They smell your fear
And They feed it
They smell your fear
And They feed ON it
Our
compassion
That we
crave
Is in our
past
An
unmarked grave
Understanding
Lies
beside
In our
dirt
Is
where they hide
The
eternal They
Are
drawing near
I must
not feel
They
live on fear!
Analysis:
The first stanza is a paranoid chant, not only calling to mind a
Stephen King poem called "Paranoid: A Chant," but is taken directly
from a scene from the movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Part II. In this
scene, the disgusting cannibal killers are trying to break through a door, and
the main character repeats this line in a petrified stupor. My point is
that her paranoid chant doesn't just apply to cinematic cannibals and monsters,
but real people. That may just be the point of all horror movies and novels.
I had a little bit of fun with the second stanza, interweaving and
rhyming the taglines for the movies The Fly and Poltergeist with the refrain
from that paranoid chant.
The third stanza is the same line written twice, with just one
word being different, and that is the operative word: "ON".
My point here was that some people, just like the clown from It, don't merely seem to get a
kick out of causing fear, but they seem to derive a bit of joy or satisfaction
from it, not only feeding fear, but feeding ON it as well.
For the next two stanzas, the key words here are
"Compassion" and "Understanding". I know these two
qualities still exist in this culture, in quite large quantities. But
when a person is hurting, like I was at the time I wrote these poems, and
surrounded by a bunch of indifferent or even malicious strangers, those two
qualities can seem quite absent from life. It makes it seem like
compassion, something we as human beings all crave, doesn't exist anymore.
It's a thing of the past. It's dead, and in it's grave, an image
straight out of the darkest horror movies. It makes it seem as though
understanding is lying right beside it in that grave, in the dirt, and hidden from
view.
For the last stanza, "All of them witches" was a refrain
from the movie Rosemary's Baby, when the main character discovered that all the
residents of her apartment complex, including her husband, were a coven of
Satan worshiping witches, all conspiring against her. I had read an
analysis of that movie that had referred to them as "the eternal
they," and I thought it fit nicely with the theme of this poem, as those
who "live on fear" seem to fit this description. They are
eternal, and they will always be here with us. The last few lines show
the result of all this. They are drawing near, and because of this
"I must not feel" because "they live on fear!" This means
that the way I must deal with them is to shut off my emotions, build a brick
wall, don't feel the fear they want you to feel.
I don't often write some of my darker emotions on paper because once they're out there, they seem a bit too intense. But we all have to deal with them at some time or another. I actually have very few poems with a dark tone such as this, which was written shortly after my Dad died and the world outside friends and family didn't seem to care. Even worse, the mean people (and we all know they're out there) seemed meaner. I think that is what I captured in this poem.
Well, and a bit of a love of horror films.
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