Category Archives: Poet’s Life

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

Daybook 2026 // Winter 2026 1.29.26

I’m pretty sure being in your 50’s is the Kansas of middle-age.

Hear me out. There’s still shit worth seeing, and there’s some sense of urgency or need to get on. There are mountains in the western distance, looming but never approaching. Common sense dictates that distance is finite but the mountains never seem to get any closer.

You have aches and pains, but you’ve had those since your 30’s (which is like crossing the Mississippi River between Illinois and Missouri in a jon boat with a questionable motor and no experience at rowing). There’s an indignity to having to stretch before getting out of bed. The hip you didn’t get replaced complains more about the cold and you start to feel like an old dog and you argue with the TV meteorologists because your aches give you an accurate forecast. The landscape is flat and full of either fallow fields or unharvested crops, neither of which has anything to do with you. Kansas feels like it lasts forever. There’s a few populated areas, but mostly you’re driving with who you started out with in Kentucky, or who you picked up hitchhiking along Route 66, or who picked you up while you were hitch hiking. If you were the one who got picked up, you’ve been there long enough that you take a shift driving.

The mountains loom. You think you can make out the snow trails on the peaks, but then you hit some traffic and have to take a piss and suddenly remember you left the boombox on back in 1982, somewhere around Vermont.

go
go
go
go

shovel snow

go
go
go
go

but
get
a
good
night’s 
sleep

go
go
go
go

re
mem
ber
your
vitamins

coffee
coffee
coffee

go
go
go

westward
on

mountains
exits
largely
as
a
matter
of faith

that
some
day
will fall
on your
head
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2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, poetry, prose, the no-scape, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.26.26

Sweater weather

The Monday after Winter Storm Fern. I have no interest in digging out or in finding my way into the world, except as a larger obligation and the realization that I will, at some point, have need. This is not to say I have turned my back on the world; rather, it picks up right where I leave it. That may be the most difficult lesson regarding time: when two friends part, the friendship begins to operate on a sort of half-life: the amount of time required for the friendship to metabolize itself in the absence of fresh interactions, whether in person or at a distance, depends entirely on the amount of toxins sticking to things. I have lost lives to my inability to understand the nature of half-life. Thus, I have learned that I must, at intervals, return to people and things I wish to nurture within myself.

I woke up this morning from dreams that left a trail like footprints disappearing in the snow. Hunkering down is good for my mind, but not necessarily for my body, since the body is meant to move. I will go out later and shovel off the porch and sidewalk, more out of the need to move than out of future necessity. In this instance, the two have a symbiotic relationship. As with all mechanical things, however, a certain amount of resistance must be overcome. I am thinking about the nature of steam and steam pumps. A steam pump operates because the resistance between steam pressure and water pressure is never equal. In order for a steam water pump to push water, the level of steam pressure must exceed the level of water pressure… the pounds per square inch that one pushes against the force of the other. There is a constant working for stasis, for balance, that, if the machinery operates correctly, is never really achieved. Because if the steam psi is balanced perfectly against liquid psi, the pump doesn’t move, energy is not produced, and work is not done. The machinery locks up.

Thus, it could be argued that it is only through resistance that we know we are alive.

These steam engine metaphors will not leave me. But maybe it’s only the broken heart that knows it’s alive.

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2026, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, poetry, prose, the no-scape, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.23.26

Baby Gabriel Garcia Marquez is Watching You. Photo by Mick Parsons

I got distracted in my own library this morning. I wasn’t even looking for anything in particular; I just had one of those gadfly memory moments, in which I was somewhere between putting on deodorant and trying to remember the trail of a dream.

Being back on a more or less regular sleeping schedule, I’ve fallen back into the casual habit of directed dreaming. Sometimes I visit the same places over and over in my dreams, and when there is a place where it feels unfinished, I try to go back. Actual directed dreaming — actively taking control within a dream — takes a lot of practice. Mostly I just try to get back and wander. The trail of the dream doesn’t matter so much as the attempt. I do it for the same reason I’ve casually started working on simple Sudoku puzzles. That reminds me of my grandmother, my mother’s mother. I remember her sitting at the kitchen table, working the word puzzles in the paper. They are both mind-focusing distractions. 

Sometimes all that remains are galley copies and memories. Sometimes less than that. Photo by Mick Parsons.
dream, 
like Borges
of an endless 
library

I moved some books around yesterday. I do this sometimes. And while I was looking again to verify that I was still satisfied with what I’d done, I noticed a few items I hadn’t looked at in a while. I still have two single copies of the first and second issues of a literary journal I spearheaded, Sticky Kitchen. That was back when I tried the small press route, a journey called One-Legged Cow Press. This was more than 20 years ago. Another life. I flipped through, looking at the names. Some of them I still know. A few I haven’t thought about in decades. I remember trying to convince Melissa, my wife then, of the higher cause of the project: the small press, the journal. She was never quite convinced. In the end, she didn’t find me all that convincing. 

the most basic
demonstration
of humanity

Before walking into the kitchen and filling my coffee thermos to come downstairs to the desk (at the merled dog’s insistence), I went back and applied more deodorant. 

Just in case.

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