Tag Archives: marriage

2026, Day Book, everyday words, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, poetry, prose, psychogeography, the no-scape

Daybook 2026 // Winter 2.26.26

I relish the days I wake up with a cleanish slate. All I want before I first open my eyes is to feel her next to me. Around her, my entire geography takes form and becomes. And then the words, and then the noisy insistence of the day, the dogs, the words, one foot and then the next foot, finding glasses and on to coffee and tobacco and words. The world, the world, fast and faster, slow and slower, becomes and unbecomes, folds and unfolds

before the machinations
interfere. But that
is rare.

I feel for her to make sure I’m still waking into the same dream. Always the sensation in my limbs, the vestiges of dreams incomplete when the body has enough, when the mind that is me today decides to drive the body machine. The static from the back of the brain tunes in like an old radio dial, finds a station that rings clear and all I can hope for some days

is that it’s a song: The Beatles or Lucinda Williams or The Bangles or Stone Temple Pilots or Lita Ford or Joe Strummer or [ ]

and not some news reel
that will bleed horror in the lens
before I even get my coffee and my first smoke of the day.

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2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, the no-scape

Daybook 2026 // Winter 2.25.26

The thing about living in a fascist state is, you don’t necessarily wake up every day thinking “I live in a fascist state.” Most days you wake up and go through your daily routines; you listen to music on the radio; you go to the movies; you complain about the price of gas; you look forward to big celebrations; if you have a job, you go; if you can afford it, you plan vacations; you check the weather report for the chance of rain or snow; you engage in whatever level usage of social media you’ve become accustomed to; you play games on your phone; you watch streaming TV channels; you listen to your spouse tell you about their day; you tell your spouse about your day; you make plans for the weekend, if you don’t work weekends; you listen to your spouse cry because one her clients died in face down in the street when he had a warm bed but that’s not where the drugs were; you take note of the social outrage at one the death of a homeless woman in a city that has criminalized being human and living outside out of fear and needing to blame someone for everything; you look to make sure the front door is locked between you and the random house search you know is coming because the leadership in the city is complicit; you think about getting drunk, but know it won’t solve anything; you feed the dogs; you order a pizza and make sure to tip the driver; you know watching the State of the Union won’t do anything but keep you up all night and decide read multiple breakdowns the following morning over black coffee, at which point it occurs, once again, that you live in a fascist state.

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2025, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, sonnet, summer, Working Class Literature

Sonnet about when the HVAC in a heat wave

We will not be broken by the heat
though the dogs languish and pant
in spite of fresh cold water in the kitchen.
There is no option but exist as best we can
soak in the cool morning air
embrace the relief of night rain
the sky cracking lightning after the long
sweaty burn of the day

taking in the dance of bats after sunset
as we sit on the back porch, finding
civility in the constant experiment
defining our home – your rescued plants
my unfinished projects – against a world
of mass-produced distraction.

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