The trees are blooming orange and yellow and the wind rattles the leaves down the street, so that means Halloween is almost here again! To celebrate, I dug into my archives to pull up five of my more Halloween-centric pieces for you. The first two appeared in the wonderful but now deceased Lonesome October Lit, an online journal that focused on eerie and spooky poems and stories. (All pieces are archived online!) The last three pieces are from my book We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine, which is available online or through me (if you want a signed copy). The book contains many more poems and pieces like those below. I hope you enjoy these pieces and that they get you into the Halloween spirit!

Prayers From Dunwich

Father, I’ve prayed
the noisome breathing
coming down the chimney
to stop, please stop,
I’ve prayed in your name
and mine

Mother, I’ve washed the blood
from the altar and the hands
and all the steps leading
back up from the cellar
where we waited and cried
and called Its name

Sister, I’ve called for you
in the night, in the howling yonder,
delicate pine saplings whipping
in the storm, lightning
like the bones of the universe
running away with you

Brother, if only I had a brother,
if only it hadn’t all fallen on me,
to build all this, watch all this,
to tend it and beckon at the called
upon hour, speak its name
on Sentinel Hill, and see it staring
back at me

Oh fellow humanity, you wretched
ignorant coiling thing, you will
know what you have begat in me
and all my ilk and all their kin
and when the right book
calls from the right hands slick
with red and black and icy wax
you will see the heavens
you pray for weekly, and watch
them fall forever, and ever
and ever after, so help It

The Guest Room Closet

Castleton on the river where Dutch
sailors roamed with Henry Hudson
in an age of haunted hollows and
autumn winds blowing cruel through
the valley, a small village grew and
survived and now the line of crooked
homes overlook a narrow street and
railroad tracks, a slight embankment
to the Hudson River, I sit at dinner
with family friends, their grandmother
cooking corned beef and cabbage
and telling us of the decades and
lifetimes spent in small tenebrous
homes and shuttered factories
all along the river, and in that very
house, be careful where you step,
she says, for the man who owned
it before her was a dark and cruel
man, twisted in body and soul, she
said, and hung himself in the guest
room’s closet — now, who wanted
second of the corned beef — but
our widened eyes met each other’s
and wasn’t that the room where I
was to sleep that night, oh honored
guest? it was, and I did, lying in a
hideous state of cold terror and
exhaustion, staring at the black
doorless hole across the darkened
room and watching, waiting for
some moaning wail, some iridescent
tentacle writhing with hellish hunger
to reach out and overpower me
where I’d lay frozen with horror, but
the hours passed, and I gave in to
sleep sometime before dawn, waking
alive and well though never able
to walk the streets of Castleton and
not think of that room, that night,
that man hanging from the beam
spanning the guest room closet
waiting for the right night, under
the right moon, to reach out and say
hello

Long Before Twilight

There were ghosts everywhere; I borrowed book after book from the library saying so, amazed and stunned that they kept this knowledge out in the open and available for anyone to read. I read about real life haunted forests and abandoned houses (like so many I knew from my own treks through the woods) and I read about witches, and then werewolves. The werewolf book was the one that stayed with me the longest, its tattered cloth binding faded and tearing, pulled from the deepest shelf of the elementary school library where no conservative school board ethics task force committee would find it. Inside there were ancient descriptions of how to turn yourself into a werewolf, complete with gibberish incantations and lists of roots and animal innards to collect. I often wondered, do I dare go into the wheat fields at night (where I knew the coyotes roamed with their red eyes) and try? Did I dare? Did I wish for that curse? I often wondered these things during October bus rides home from school or rides home from an evening visit with our grandparents, but it never happened. I never worked up the courage to damn myself at the mere age of eleven, and to this day I think back and smile about that silly book, even looked for it on the internet once but couldn’t find it. When I walk home from the bars now or from a late night in the office, I sometimes look up at the full moon and think about being eleven years old riding the school bus and reading that book, and even standing on the edge of the wheat fields beyond the trailer park fence at dusk, looking out at all of those coyote packs with their nimble red eyes blinking back at me, wondering which fate would be worse. But of course, they all lead to the same road, the same exit, the same howling end.

Maladies & Memories

The people in the big yellow trailer with the brick driveway, they gave out the best candy bars on Halloween. King-sized bars, and often toys too, a yo-yo or a paddle ball or stuffed animals in little Halloween costumes. All of us food stamp kids living in the trailer park would rush across yards of dogs, junked cars, rusted swing sets, past lit-up doorways filled with jack-o-lanterns and streaming white cobwebs, through crowds and karma in order to reach that one house. We had to get there before the gangs of kids from other neighborhoods came and took our candy. Some years we were lucky. Some years we were too late. All years we sang our song door to door as those grinning sawtooth jack-o-lanterns stared at us, cackling their fire, orange guts weeping fierce maladies and memories, howling at the darkness, too soon fading to black as the night came to an end for us all. That’s how it was for many years, until someone started a fire behind the yellow trailer where the people who would hand out full candy bars lived. The police called it arson, started the day before Halloween, started by someone who didn’t know they were taking away our magic, ripping the sleeve from our childhood, gouging the eyes of the jack-o-lantern souls flicking inside every one of us, which would also go out eventually. But maybe not for all of us. Some would hold on. I tried to hold on. Maybe I did, in a way, by remembering, a little light left somewhere in the catacombs beneath my adulthood. That night, that last true Halloween, there would be no flicker that night, no fire. Nothing but pulp and forever after we’d find tedious doorsteps of Novembers and decades of doldrums, lives beyond childhood, all of us Halloween survivors staring up at a half moon lilting through one stale night after another. Too young to catch that last Halloween magic, and now too old to go home again.

Oct. 31

What a hell-cat evening, pitch-black perfect by 6 p.m. with the wind scattering every kid in the county down our street, door to door in costumes with bags of all kinds, scaring up candy like it was our job, our life’s purpose. The white ephemeral clouds circled the moon like cobwebs in the stars. For the first few years it was just the trailer trash kids—my circle of friends and enemies—who would make the rounds, but sometime in the 1980s when the razor blades wound up in candy bars and those nondescript cherry red rape vans began to make the news, parents got the idea to drive their kids to safer neighborhoods to watch over them. Our trailer park out in the cozy middle of nowhere, out in the pine barrens beyond Nassau, was just the place for scared suburbanites to come and celebrate like the good pagans we all are deep at heart. We trailer trash kids didn’t care because it added a sense of the unknown to our night, a flock of strangers to mingle with through the darkened yards and sidewalks, our feet darting in and out of flickering jack-o-lantern lights, the visceral scent of pumpkins and rotting leaves and makeup. Some trailers were set back in the woods or had shaded, dark pathways to their front porches, and a handful would play those scary sound-effect cassette tapes, which were so damn good that I’d sometimes sit under the windows and listen to those scary stories and sounds creaking through the speakers of a propped up boom box all night, imagining the walking dead, the howling wolves, the witches’ cauldron. The build-up to that magic night was unmistakably heaven, the car rides to distant pumpkin patches and fall carnivals with hay mazes and cider donuts and dark wanderings around farm houses done up to look like something from a Charlie Brown special—my heaven. When that night finally came, the hours rushed by, life racing to oncoming death, each door a friend with a parting gift. The knowledge that the night was fading away hung over every joke between friends, every candy-trade, every costume change to go back out for Round Two to see if people would still give us candy at 10 p.m., and some did. May the gods bless their Halloween hearts. Each of their still-lit doors and glowing pumpkin skulls were a reprieve from the final moment when we’d admit it was over and walk home under those cobwebbed skies to wait through three more seasons for the only night that seemed to matter, for the only night that made sense.