People always have some candy-coated holiday message about the real gift being time with family or good holiday cheer or some slick lie about how it’s the thought that counts. Folks, I once believed these slogans to be true, but I also believed that a fat man in a red coat slid down my chimney, ate cookies and milk, and tossed a couple presents under the tree before scooching back up the soot shoot into the night. What I’m trying to say isn’t that different from all those adds on TV—the ones that twinkle on Thanksgiving day, trying to remind you how to remain important to the people in your life: you buy them things.

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I’ve got some things. Book-things. They wrap easily and last for years! You could even give the same book to a bunch of different people and they would never know. They could even be signed-by-the-author books. I’m only going to do this once (this year). My chapbooks—Two Sides of the Same Thing and The Smallest Working Pieces—make great gifts.

Buy them online (links above) or send me a note and I can pass on signed copies, perhaps with a bonus audio recording of some of the poems.

(VOICE OVER) Prices you can’t beat! Poetry is the new flat screen TV. Move over video games! Who wants a new car? Not me! Books for everyone! (Laughter, holiday music, everything overly decked out in red and green, glittering, too-pretty people with white white teeth in suburban homes where it seems to be snowing out the window, excess wrapping paper, happy children and puppies with bows for collars—FADE OUT).