Tag Archives: Day Book

2026, Day Book, everyday words, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.7.26

1.7.26

Begin again.

The world’s machine’s mechanisms run regardless in a pre-ordained program covered in iteration upon iteration of user design models. We are so far from how the soup is made, it’s all a needle prick to the gut and the promise of future health savings. 

Begin again, word machine: with your hot coffee, tart apple, pipe, and (different) hip pain. Begin again because they are counting on you. Begin again because you are counting on yourself. Begin with your weapons of choice: a sharpened pencil, bare paper, the naked insistence which fuels you. Move the gears, grease the pistons. Give us a little play. 

Begin again.

These steamboat metaphors break my heart. But it is a loving pain, a teary-eyed executioner.

Move, piston. Move.

ma
chine

clang
type

a diction
ary

with
fingers

a fingers
of diction

aries
ma
chine
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2022, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature

Day Book: 17 March 2022

1.

I have mind palaces
like Nick Cage used to have castles.

2.

I move surest in transitional seasons. This Spring comes on the cusp of a cold winter.

Coming up on 7 years since I taught in a college classroom. 7 years written off. They will not, it seems, have me back.

But here I am. Building. Revised. Rewrit down to the bone.

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2022, Day Book, essay, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose

Day Book 8 March ’22: I believe in monsters

I believe in monsters. I always have. When I was very young, I saw them. At night the walls of my room fell away into the dark and I saw them. Some of them watched me. Some of them talked to me. Some ignored me. I was awash in creatures that both looked and didn’t look like anything I found in the World Book Encyclopedias on my parents’ bookshelves or in the decades of National Geographics at my grandparents’ house. I knew the Yeti and Bigfoot were real before I’d ever heard of them. The same goes for the Nessie. I still believe monsters are real because there isn’t significant compelling evidence they aren’t.

This is the same reason I don’t doubt that life exists on other planets, that divine beings are real along with the multiverse… as Hugh Everett III first described it. It’s important to be open to these things. When the dark opens to you, you can’t unsee the dark. You can’t unsee the eyes.

This time last year I met a monster trying walk from Savanna, Illinois to Moline. It came in the rain… a heavy unrelenting rain that made me question myself. Wet socks. Broken boots. When I turned back I knew the monster had beat me. That time. Beat me. But didn’t kill me.

If I’ve learned anything over the last year since it’s that I don’t need to question myself. Yes, I’ve got a tricky hip and my feet aren’t the greatest. Yes, I trudge slow on the thin skin of the world. But I’ve also been reminded, being a lot dog out in all kinds of weather, looked through, dismissed, and overlooked: I’m not just a person walking through the world.

I’m a monster too.

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