Towards A True All-Souls Day:

Re-Branding Halloween for the Unborn.

Detritus: Mal’Poetica

—The poetry and lyric column of the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists Newsletter

All Hallows Eve, All Hollow Year

—Filed by Jánosh Alovatski, Correspondent for Religion and Alt-Spirituality

Well it’s almost here—the new high holy day of America: Halloween.

But just as Ringling Bros. went out of business after the circus became the culture itself, our annual carnival of death and deformity has grown so overfed on irony that it no longer fits back into October. The grotesque has gone year-round; the holiday has annexed the calendar.

Children once masqueraded as heroes and outlaws. Our Editor’s favorite Halloween was that one night when the full moon was bright and he dressed as Zorro—the avenger, the gentleman in black who defended the helpless. Even Frankenstein, cobbled together from wayward souls, longed for life, longed for love, longed to be human.

But the contemporary celebration seems less about life flirting with death and more about death flirting with permanence. Every second lawn is strewn with plastic graves and animated corpses. Even Home Depot has been conquered by the bone cult; its aisles a mortuary midway.

Nature occasionally misshapes its creatures— and we know Nature doesn’t always get it right, but that’s not a reason to party!

All Souls Forgotten

Once, October 31st was followed on November 2nd by All Souls Day. A holy obligation, not a photo op.

It was a day to remember the souls that had departed. Yet one of our staff—an ex-altar boy who still can’t forget the feel of the incense and the gravity of the bell—confessed that as a boy he felt something more mysterious than mourning: a weight from the other direction. The weight of souls yet to be born.

It occurs to us that perhaps there are more of them now—those souls waiting, hovering, half-formed in the wings of creation—than there are souls already departed. If so, then All Souls Day should also be their day. The unborn and the unmade. Those still waiting for their cue in the cosmic drama.

Halloween celebrates the departed—the mockery and masquerade of death—but we might invert the rite. What if the truer holy day honored the unarrived? The invisible multitudes pressing forward toward incarnation, whispering through the veil, “Wait for us.”

🎶Snowflakes that melt in the sun, Beautiful songs that will never be sung, These are the stories that follow the human race. Spirits that long to be free, Waiting in you, Waiting in me. Waiting in lovers all over the universe🎶

As that song goes- – –

We still have St. Valentine’s Day, but that too has been massacred—roses replaced with algorithmic dating apps and disposable sentiment.

Cultural Autopsy: Costume and Confusion

This year’s trending costume is difficult to detect. When masculine women and feminine men are the everyday spectacle, Halloween costume contests feel redundant. Identity has become the masquerade.

Our poetic division offers its own musical diagnosis: a newly updated song collaboration between Black Cloud and Donovan Leitch, titled—what else—

🎶 Season of the Switch 🎶

(Donovan Leitch / Black Cloud)

When I look out my window,

many frights to see.

And when I look into my Windows,

so many different people to be.

That it’s strange.

This sex change—

You got to pick at every stitch.

Must be the season of the switch,

must be the season of the switch, yeah,

must be the season of the switch.

When I look over my shoulder,

What do you think I see?

Some other cat looking over

Their shoulder at me.

And he’s strange, I’m sure she’s strange.

You’ve got to pick at every stitch,

You’ve got to scratch at every itch,

Gay marriage made the family values pitch,

Beatniks now have made it kitsch,

Surgeons are out to make it rich—

Oh no, must be the season of the switch,

Must be the season of the switch, yeah,

Must be the season of the switch.

Council Commentary

Editor’s marginalia, transcribed by the Backward Scholar (B.S.)

Semiotic note: The “switch” operates both electrically and metaphysically—a toggle between genders, channels, and realities. The poet hears the hum of a culture caught mid-transition, a civilization flipping its polarity. Sociological aside: Once, dressing up meant aspiring upward—to saints, heroes, outlaws. Now it means dissolving into a crowd of undead consumers. Liturgical coda: Perhaps the only exorcism left is remembrance. The Council therefore proposes a modest ritual: on All Souls Day, light a candle not for the dead, but for the unborn and the unmade.

Filed from: The Council’s Department of Spiritual Hygiene and Seasonal Anxieties

Cross-reference: Cultural Autopsy / Signs & Wonders / Theology of the Grotesque

“What we celebrate, we become.” — John St. Evola

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