I need one or two oddities. I’ll even make them up.

The only red eyes in the bushes are caps removed by revelers

Hooting across the tops of the bottles they stripped.

The best thing we discovered was a carload of bartenders

Waiting at the cemetery gate where we all heard it clang.

Widths of moon-hemmed headstones bulged between gaps

As headlights glanced the fence,

And we just left, engine revving a gasp.

My sketchbook didn’t gain any strange silhouettes.

We bought our weekend shots with uneasy laughs.

The other graveyard on my hometown street was too mundane for that,

A morning commute’s morbid bookmark at the bus stop.

If I saw a ghost, it was in costume, cheering itself up.

Up north in vineyard country, winged apes were promised

Careening over drivers up a hill of quiet houses.

Down here I hoped to be as harmlessly startled

With a shaggy moth the size of a bridge hurling shadows over the foothills,

Or gnomes trailing the drainage canal, gone in a blink in paper boats.

This town should poke itself a hole, tattoos where oddities infect

The flat suburban maps out of their poreless condo skin again.