Tag Archives: coffee

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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2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose

Daybook 2026 //Winter 1.9.26

I dropped my apple this morning and nearly choked on a cough drop. These, too, may become the symbols of an age; it certainly feels like symbols of my age, which is best classified as “Young but Feeling It.” Some apples are hardier than others. Like my mother’s mother, I favor tart pie apples. They remind me of the ones that used to grow on the trees in my mother’s parents’ yard, and long conversations over gin rummy about Jesus, back before I started being people’s great disappointment. 

It’s raining and from my desk in the basement, it could be a spring rain. It isn’t. The weather has been kind this week. but all that means is that somewhere on the other side of this rain is cooler weather. Tart pie apples still taste like spring when it is winter raining. Cough drops always taste like winter.

January 
rain
tastes
 like 
cough 
dro
ps tart 
pie apples
the expect
ation of fall
ing and becom
ing just 
a bruised apple
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