Wednesday, October 31, 2012

For Halloween, A Poem: Fear


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.

No comments:

Post a Comment