Tag Archives: Day Book

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

Daybook 2026 // Winter 2.3.26

“Footprints” Doodle by Mick Parsons

She looks out the window and spits out the word ‘melt,’ the worst curse she can think of against a layer of ice and snow that will not relent. In milder winters, it was that the mosquitoes didn’t die and the backyard mud carried in by the dogs. We have dug out of this mild inconvenience as best we can. I put my faith in her curses more than the snow plow that never touches our street. There are tales of an old International Harvester with a snow plow and an engine that does not die, but code enforcement actively silences these rumors. But waiting for spring is still considered a carnal act of rebellion.

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

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.22.26

Early morning, but maybe not too early. Once again, the dog knows where I belong.

Give me my pencil and a space of unused paper, a reheated cup of yesterday evening’s coffee, some music, a simple radio: listening to Muddy Waters on cassette. The sound of callouses strong enough to break glass and make those wound strings bleed a little. This is the lesson. We must practice, so we can make our tools bleed.

Bleed, ye! This is the Thursday Blues.

Try to push out of frame, for a while, the battles collecting themselves at my door, crowded next to the same old Truth. All I want is to write and be left to it, and maybe have a few small comforts. Love. Warmth. Decent coffee. I need to feel like I’ve earned my morning apple. I’d like this to include finding a way to pay bills that doesn’t suck my soul out through my nose. 

If possible, I would prefer the world not be perpetually burning. But that is an institutional obstacle.

Go back to bed, love. 
It just the house, burning.
Do not fret, love. 
Do not fret.
It will only hurt
this very little
very tiny bit.

The cassette plays stretchy and tired, especially on the bridge and guitar solo. There is a particular sound to fingers that find electric pickups amusingly quaint and unnecessary to the singing of the strings. A sound sung by calloused fingers that learned to make heavy brass wound strings cry and sing the blood songs of centuries. The cassette, it still plays, all tired and stretchy, until at some point, it will need a pencil to put it right.

In the winter of America
I am tired of the feedback loop
echoes of dead algorithms
programmed to sound like machines
running lights that themselves lie
and claim to be
long burnt out stars
still shining


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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.

sl
ee
p
sl
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sl
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p
dear
lo
ve
the
work
wa
its


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