Category Archives: psychogeography

2026, Day Book, everyday words, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, Prose Poem, psychogeography, the no-scape

birds of blind faith and chaos and memory

The red cardinal looks fat and unhappy, perched on top of the shepherd’s hook holding an empty bird feeder. We have broken faith, and the birds will remember. The grackles, at least, understand the chaotic nature of the world and have found other places to graze in a most anti-environmental fashion. Farmers don’t like grackles because they eat the corn when it’s green on the stalk and aren’t as sociable as crows to believe in crucified straw men. Farmers don’t like grackles for the same reason some people don’t like cats: grackles and cats act more like we are than we’d like to tell ourselves we are.  Thus, like the faithless in any culture, grackles are outlaws, but don’t take it personally, as one day the seed or suet will always be gone. The cardinal took off, but will return. They are birds of blind faith.

Standard
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.

Standard
2025, Autumn, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose, Prose Poem, psychogeography, travel

Was a time, I’d bring Fall home in my rucksack

During my traveling days, I preferred to go during transitional seasons. Fall was my favorite time, and I’d go north, against the migration of birds. I’d go to the mountains, or to big sky country, where the season unfurls earlier, go in search of the dying expressions of the leaves: red, orange, yellow, the resistant evergreens. There are lessons to be learned from the last gasp of beauty before the trees stand naked, bare armed against the coming winter.  It is possible to relearn the smell of the air before the weather changes, before rain; the cold prelude kiss of an early snowfall… things forgotten in an age of digitized hyper-realities and Hallmark memories of a man-made world that never really existed. And when I arrived back to home’s warm arms, I unpacked and set it free: the bright dying, the scent of the air.

It was the only homecoming gift I could think of that mattered.

Standard