9 Poems For Halloween

1. Ghosts

Take
Ghosts, they're
Hosts to their own
Haunting,
Wanting
Attention for the
Retention of their
Myth, as
If they
Existed, each
Twisted
Fake

For the next eight days up to and including Monday 31st October [but not tomorrow when I will be at Wembley watching the NFL game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Chicago Bears] I will post a Halloween poem from the collection Gathering published by Thornacorn Press in 1993.

If any English teachers out there read this blog - it's always possible - there is a creative writing idea for students using some of these poems [the 'tamer' ones; not, for example, the Succubus where it wouldn't be wise to be explaining the sexual proclivities of this nighttime demon] on Teachit [www.teachit.co.uk] and it is titled simply Halloween Poems. So if on that spooky Monday you don't have fucking targets to meet or any other shite extraneous and meaningless hurdles to leap and you fancy having some fun, you might like to try this. I also have a model for experimenting with front-of-line rhymes that uses animals rather than Halloween creatures which I'll place in the Comments section.

The cover for this pamphlet was produced by then Elizabeth Sullivan and I have also posted her original ink drawing here - thanks Liz.