…some poems you probably don’t want to read on Valentine’s Day…

…curdled, hurtful memories of heroin and voodoo…

…brief snapshots stolen from a Greek hotel…

…a long ride down the Tunnel of Love, and then back again…

…warnings about the inherent dangers of dating succubi and incubi…

…and some friendly advice for poets in love.

As with last season’s chap (buy now), people who buy The Spring Chap will also get a free audiobook download read by the author.

I’ve received a fair amount of mail from listeners over the past few months who, much like Oliver Twist, are politely asking for more. In many cases, they want to stop being listeners and start being readers. Really, as a writer, there’s nothing better to hear.

And I’d love it if I could point you all to Amazon or your local bookstore where copies of Assam & Darjeeling and Matters of Mortology are waiting on the shelves. But there’s a few things that need to happen before that comes to pass. There’s still the matter of needing an agent, for instance. And finding a publisher. Little details like that.

So until that happy day, it occurs to me that I’ve written quite a lot over the years — much of which has never seen the light of day.

And so, leading up to Samhain — which marks the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter, of course — I’m pleased to announce that The Winter Chap is now available for purchase through the print-on-demand service Lulu.com.

It’s a little thing, really, just a chapbook of selected poems and short stories that I’ve written over the years. Most of which haven’t been collected or published anywhere else, except perhaps here on this site.

The Winter Chap is 50 pages worth of stories and poems, including:

• Two Ghosts
• Hooves
• Witch Girl
• The Pink Lady
• The Queen of Middle Night
• Witchglass
• Baba Yaga
• The Whispering Boy

Much of this is new or never before released material, but some of it will be familiar to regular and longtime followers of this blog. And in addition, if you’re kind enough to buy it, you’ll find that it comes with a link to download a free, exclusive audiobook of the text (read by the author, of course).

And, yes, as you may surmise from the title and contents, there will be other Chaps — three more, in fact. One for each of the seasons. Here’s hoping we get Assam & Darjeeling and Matters of Mortology on their way to the bookstore shelves before Winter rolls around again next year.

Click here to order a copy The Winter Chap.

Edgar Allen Poe notwithstanding, Poetry seems to be one of those things that people don’t typically associate with Horror — either as a genre or as an emotional reaction.

I don’t know that I’m smart enough or qualified enough to really delve into the nature of Poetry and how it works on us as readers — not without seriously embarrassing myself. But at the very least, I would like to share a poem that has stayed with me ever since I first read it, long ago when I was young.

There were a number of books on shelves in our family room — put there, I expect, because of the attractiveness of their binding and the need to fill the shelf with something. There was a multivolume set called “The Yale Library”, as I recall, along with a handful of other books that seemed to serve no other purpose than to be held up by decorative bookends on the mantle.

One of the books was a volume of collected poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay. I think it must have been my father who first pointed me to her poem “Wraith” when I was still in elementary school:

“Thin Rain, whom are you haunting,
That you haunt my door?”
—Surely it is not I she’s wanting;
Someone living here before—
“Nobody’s in the house but me:
You may come in if you like and see.”

Thin as thread, with exquisite fingers,—
Have you seen her, any of you?—
Grey shawl, and leaning on the wind,
And the garden showing through?

Glimmering eyes,—and silent, mostly,
Sort of a whisper, sort of a purr,
Asking something, asking it over,
If you get a sound from her.—

Ever see her, any of you?—
Strangest thing I’ve ever known,—
Every night since I moved in,
And I came to be alone.

“Thin Rain, hush with your knocking!
You may not come in!
This is I that you hear rocking;
Nobody’s with me, nor has been!”

Curious, how she tried the window,—
Odd, the way she tries the door,—
Wonder just what sort of people
Could have had this house before…

It’s a ghost story, obviously. But it doesn’t read to me like a deliberate work of horror, although it’s difficult to know what Millay’s inspiration and intention was. I can remember combing through the rest of the book looking for something else, but (at the time) none of it struck me in the same way.

Because she didn’t write more in this vein, “Wraith” rings true to me, genuine. With apologies for my own speculation, the poem feels like it came directly from experience. Certainly most of the rest of her poetry follows that process, so why wouldn’t this one?

Not only does that make me feel a kinship with Millay but I also see that she felt that same quality, that sadness which seems to lie at the heart of a lot of ghost stories.

And that it is a poem only serves to enhance and expand that feeling of the other, the weird — I mean to say, that late-at-night-no-one-awake-but-me feeling that so often amplifies every sound and strips away the natural, rational skepticism that prevents us from remembering that we live among the dead, one world overlapping the other.

In my case, it doesn’t have to be that late at night, either.

Writing this, I realize for the first time how much this poem parallels my comments from a couple of days ago, the idea of home and comfort and how important those things are to us now and after we’re gone. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why it has stayed with me for so long. When I finally left my parents’ home and went off on my own, Millay’s collection was one of the things that went with me.

I have it still and, still, it haunts me.

I was struck by a brief passage, near the end:
Three days before he died, my father had bought a new car. He had driven it once, maybe twice, and when I returned to his house after the funeral, I saw it sitting in the garage, already defunct, like some huge, stillborn creature. Later that same day i went off to the garage for a moment to be by myself. I sat down behind the wheel of his car, inhaling the strange factory newness of it. The odometer read sixty-seven miles. That also happened to have been my father’s age: sixty-seven years.

I was thinking about that passage this morning, making my tea. Auster’s book The Red Notebook is somewhat of a treatise on such coincidences, the strange intersections of fate that punctuate every aspect of our lives.

These kinds of things happen to Auster a lot, if we take him at his word. It’s not that Auster is somehow more attuned to those things than the rest of us, that he is more equipped to see them. It just seems that there are more of them in his life.

Making my tea, I was thinking to myself how, for the most part, I don’t see those kinds of coincidences in my life. And it’s not because I don’t look for them. I walk around most days with my ear to the ground, listening for whatever is rumbling beneath . . . but there’s nothing there. At least, nothing like that.

I made my tea and came in to listen to The Writer’s Almanac, just as I do most mornings. Today, for the day before Valentine’s Day, Keillor read Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

Now therefore, while the
youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapp’d power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

I’d forgotten the line about “But at my back I always hear…” and it gave me a bit of a chill because of how it echoes through Eliot’s The Waste Land: “But at my back in a cold blast / I hear the rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.”

Last night, I couldn’t find anything to catch my interest and would have rented The Third Man for about the thousandth time but I asked the guy behind the counter to recommend something.

“What are you looking for?” He asked.

“I have no idea. Something very good, but overlooked. Something that I haven’t seen.”

Without hesitation, he said “Try 25th Hour. I watched it last night.”

“With Edward Norton?

“Yeah.”

“Is it good?”

“I thought it was great.”

I found it on the shelf and came home.

This morning, I’m making tea and thinking about Paul Auster and coincidence with Marvell and Eliot rattling around in there somewhere. I wanted to write today but I also thought I might drink my tea and watch a little bit of the movie. Edward Norton’s somewhat of the template for the villain in what I’ve been writing, so I rationalized to myself that it wasn’t lazy to waste time watching a movie with him in it when I should be writing.

It’s a good movie. Norton is, as always, excellent. About ten minutes in, there’s a scene set in a preparatory school. It starts with a young girl (played by Anna Paquin) reading a poem.

The poem is Marvell’s “To a Coy Mistress” — which some people might take as some sort of sign.

[Addendum: I added this a few minutes after the original post above.]

I make another cup of tea, write this post, and sit down to watch a little bit more of the movie.

A few scenes later, the girl is arguing with her teacher (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) about a grade she received on a paper. “I write better than anyone else in the class,” she says to him.

“Forget about them. You’re not competing with them.” He tells her.

At that moment, the power in my apartment kicks out and the television goes dark.

Again, some people might take this sort of thing as a sign.

Time to write…