The white ephemeral clouds circled the moon like cobwebs in the stars. 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. What a hell-cat evening, pitch-black perfect by 6 p.m. Too young to catch that last Halloween magic, and now too old to go home again. 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. That night, that last true Halloween, there would be no flicker that night, no fire. Maybe I did, in a way, by remembering, a little light left somewhere in the catacombs beneath my adulthood. 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. 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.

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. We had to get there before the gangs of kids from other neighborhoods came and took our candy. 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. King-sized bars, and often toys too, a yo-yo or a paddle ball or stuffed animals in little Halloween costumes. The people in the big yellow trailer with the brick driveway, they gave out the best candy bars on Halloween. But of course, they all lead to the same road, the same exit, the same howling end. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 hope you enjoy these pieces and that they get you into the Halloween spirit! The book contains many more poems and pieces like those below. (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 first two appeared in the wonderful but now deceased Lonesome October Lit, an online journal that focused on eerie and spooky poems and stories. 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.

Poem using candy bars