Category Archives: Poet’s Life

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

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.21.26

“Art is not the privilege of a class; it is essentially human and is both individual and universal.” – George Ward Nicols, 1877

The morning radio host had to tell me “If You Leave” by Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark from the Pretty in Pink soundtrack turned 40 today. There’s a moment here where I’m supposed to say “ouch” and wax nostalgic for a few beats. And I suppose I did. It’s good to remember that I was 12 years old when I went in search of the arcane knowledge about high school and adulthood in the movies. Being gifted and cursed with an active and strong imagination, I tended to live like I was living the layers of a life. I was a spy with a cover story. I was a crash-landed alien stuck and waiting to be rescued, turning it into a research mission to occupy my time until the mothership arrived.

I didn’t figure out what I’d done to myself until I heard it in the David Cronenberg’s movie of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. “It’s like an agent who’s come to believe his own cover story,” Benway told William Lee, mixing the cure in with the bug powder. “But who’s in there, hiding, in a larval state. Just waiting for a time to hatch out.” Later, when Lee was trading the mugmump machine back for Clarknova, the enemy (?) handler tried to convince Lee not to believe his own cover story by warning about an agent in Anexia who had come to believe her cover story.
It took some years to work myself back out, I suppose.

Struggling a little to focus this morning. Yesterday was a day with too little sleep. Today is a day after having slept maybe too well. We are fully enveloped in winter, which is to say it feels a little early in comparison to the last few years. A hard cold winter will make for a good spring, though, or so I tell myself. It lets the earth rest right and proper. Let’s hope the earth wakes up focused and ready to work. There will be plenty of it to do. So goes into the report, anyway.

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2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, poetry, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.20.26

0530

The old merled dog wakes us at 0330. The plot against sleep continues through the winter. The winter is full of plots, real and imagined and at this early hour I can’t tell if it’s the one against my wife sleeping, the one against me sleeping, or the one in which the dogs crawl under the porch to take a shit. I may have to take up midnight fishing just to sleep properly again. The plots exchange themselves out of convenience, because now I’m certain the dog’s plot all along was to get me down to the basement. She knows I will give up and come down here, coffee and apple and tobacco and words. 

In my head, the plot unfolds in which I question why I bother getting out of bed, why the tired machine persists. The usefulness of a man is defined by the amount of money for which he exchanges his time between birth and death. These mornings of coffee and apple and tobacco and words I try to keep in mind that practice and faith in the mystical mechanics of the universe are enough. Ply the old ways. Fill the head with notions, jigger, then empty. Every line and phrase is a word cocktail, the output of a machine made for that purpose. The old merled dog knows nothing of this. Only that something drives her, too.

no one will know I ever arrived
until I’m gone
kicked along by some other current
a pebble 
gradually worn down
into bone dust

merled
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2026, Day Book, Poet's Life, Prose Poem

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.10.26

I’ve hidden long enough in the world of work.

Now my work is my world.

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