Scarecrows

they crop up, this time of year, on
lawns untroubled by tubers or the
like, pale vestiges of their former,
workaday selves, clad in old clothes
and caps, to scare off the crows....

now, the mass-produced grins mirror
each other, staked in similar clipped
suburban lawns, reduced to the
decorative, the false pleat, the
row of buttons designed to catch the eye

crows are nonplussed by such fellows,
storebought, their tags still attached
as they are staked into the ground, a
xerographic, sixth-generation copy of their
sterner cousins, trousers cut to

ribbons in the wind, their aspect
fearsome, clad, as they were, in
the clothes of the dead, the tattered
remnants of a Sunday suit, worn
shiny, cuffs and collar frayed

and crows and candy-gorging goblins alike,
pass them by, unseeing, unafraid