Trick or treat, fear or sweet,

Trick or treat,

fear or sweet,

now you choose:

do you wish to be

ruled by your fears or

your desires? your designs?

Your starting

steppingstone: feel it,

recognize it. Name it.

Atychiphobia (fear of failure),

Atelophobia (fear of imperfection),

Doxophobia (fear of expressing opinions, or of receiving praise),

by whom are you ruled? and to what length

do you measure your worth? and when

did I get to Paris?

but that’s beside the point, and more

on point is maybe you are more aware

of your Arachnephobia (fear of spiders),

your Nyctohylophobia (fear of dark, wooded areas or forests at nighttime),

your Agoraphobia (fear of public places)?

Your deprivatization of these

fears has made them

laughable, hyperbolical, remediable.

Ground on which you are

firmly aware becomes the old

ground, steps descending disappearing,

your first treat: taste the sweetness

of victory over your fears, your so-called

survival instincts, primitive and still

of use. This week

(by standard fashion), we will recognize

and solidify our fears into concrete.

We will write a poem

addressing our

least approachable, least appreciated, most ridiculous

phobias. We will use any form

of verse we wish, but, and since

it’s Halloween, each poem will begin:

“Trick or treat.”

Make your poems hair-raising, harebrained;

are you scared of rabbits or just the children

of your past? Discover

newly uncovered nightmares, terrors

of your mundane behaviour: why didn’t you

start this essay earlier? Procrastination

is a fancier noun than the dread

behind it: of what
are you afraid?

Okay, O fine, I have a fear

of imperfection coupled

with a fear of academic writing, so what

do I do?

I can stand

on this baseline and take

the path up, tearing apart

this essay while tearing

open the candy, the sugary sweet

reward for challenging my instincts.

Monologue your anxiety

on paper. How did it feel

to overcome that hairy jumping spider of death?

Or parasailed over your Acrophobia (fear of heights) to grab the sweetness

from the air? Or taken that first step toward

your next greatest dream,

and cemented the cornerstone

into your freedom? How

did it feel when I recognized my fear,

rose one step higher, and scribed this

essay as a nontraditionally-accepted

(or traditionally non-accepted)

form of standard expository writing?

Sweet. but wait,
you didn't face your fear at all,
you just kind of went around it, to
which I reply: It is an essay
dressed in verses, disguises, now
Happy Halloween, and also: you
don't always have to
kill the spider.

When you recognize

which of the above are yet

to be collected, that is the Moment

you will compose this week. By doing

this, discover your hidden

Papyrophobia (fear of paper) and Scriptophobia (fear of writing in public),

and welcome yourself to your new world,

where the brave are the free, and the daring,

divine. Macabre or comedy,

rhyming verse or free,

your Moment is yours to create,

just begin it: “Trick or treat.”

Now to be fair, here's my Moment:

Construction paper

-SRT