2026, Field Notes, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose

The World of Yesterday

from Field Notes:

I long for the Democracy of a pre-Nazi Viennese coffee house.Someday corporate coffee dispensers will be remembered as an early anti-democratic impulse.

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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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2025, poetry, river life, Working Class Literature

the world washes over me, often”

the world washes over me, often
waves of conversations
I must remind myself
there is purpose in holding on
cars and tugs and trains sweep by
dreams on their way to other imaginations
the river pushes past, all apparitions
following the currents south
to the delta at Cairo
where I am told
where I must remember
dreams went to die
and those who hung on
with them

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