1.
song sparrows and ants
promises of the season
call, march this new day
2.
the dogs, being kind
let me sleep in -- grace
is best unspoken
3.
body remedies:
hot coffee, fresh air
a cold face wash
[Daybook 2026: Spring 3.20.26]
Tag Archives: Kentucky
Daybook 2026 /Winter 2.9.26
The river is frozen but no one really thinks it will thaw, except maybe the old captains no one listens to, anyway, and the engineers, who no one sees until something breaks. This is not the new ice age, but the same old one on repeat. In the age of streaming no one remembers shows getting syndicated. After 100 shows you’d find your favorite prime time show playing between after school cartoons and the 6 O’clock news in situ in perpetuity, until one day, perpetuity runs out.
The current in situ perpetuity will run out, too.
I participated in a lovely reading celebrating the life and memory of Beat ingenue, Neal Cassady. He’s the latest to get rehabbed and retconned, having finally been acknowledged for the influence he had over the work of Kerouac, who’s probably been watered down and worked over enough. Of course they light candles to Neal now that he’s dead, long dead and beyond being able to spend the royalties on a pack of smokes,a pull of whiskey, a crisp, cold beer, or a damn hamburger with all the fixin’s. But it’s important in this time of having to again define what it means to be from the United States, what it means to want to make art, what it means when you want your life to be art, to be a poem, in these the falling days of the Post-American Century. It’s important to remember that somewhere in the heart of all this mass-medificated misinformation we bleed for more than just dollars and dream of more than to be the latest anti-social media influencer.
I am trying to remember what it means to be part of a community again; it used to feel something like second nature, but I have stripped myself down to component parts and am rebuilding again. It’s good to remember our literary and otherwise roots, good to know where we’ve come from because that helps tell us where we’re going. I can never get over feeling awkward, wandering into readings like gunslinger, all alone with a holster of poems and a stomach full of rage that I keep hearing needs to be love
being told so by people who do not understand they are the exact same thing.
a motor
is an easy bit
of tech
transforms
the in
visible
into
work
motion
a spinning pinion
a fan a flywheel
a few words
a poem
like ol; Doc
(William Carlos)
Williams said
I meant to read some poems from my forthcoming collection, The Call Sign is Jonah, but instead dug out an 11-year-old poem, “A Few Lines for Ernesto Cardenal,” one of my favorite Latin American Poets: poet, priest, Sandinista, who prayed for the troops before they went off to fight the CIA backed death squads supporting Somoza. He would eventually break from them when Ortega took over the party and turned into the same kind of bloody dictator that Somoza was. He was, like Whitman, a pure American Poet: American in the sense that the entire western Hemisphere is America, and not just the United States. So I read from an old poem, written nine years before his death. Had I known he was in Cincinnati in 2011, I might have tried to go and see him, but I was drunk somewhere in a northern tundra, waiting for a marriage to die and spitting words at the fascists sitting on the country board.
Here at home, the Mayor McPhoto Op is continuing his clean city campaign by attacking unregistered donation boxes. When he goes after the little libraries, will the conservative party finally embrace him for what he is?
Daybook 2026 // Winter 2.6.26
Goat Knowing
No one asked the question that needed to be asked.
I suspect they thought it would sound too aggressive, or make it sound too political, or detract from the specific issue. So reasonable. So patient with the powers that be and the insistence on reasonable petition.
That sort of mewling behavior is the most ungoatlike I’ve ever seen. I went expecting passionate, granola, dark hippies: the kind who home school their kids, grow their own kale but secretly hate it, and are staunchly anti-vax based on three YouTube videos and a misquote from someone’s granddaddy; but what I ended up finding were sort of mainline libertarians and a few religious democrats.
Goats. I mean goats. not GOAT, which is an acronym, but we’re not talking about Ali here either, and unless you’re talking about Muhammad Ali, there is no one else in the history of sport or culture that has earned the title Greatest of All Time. Yes, we’re in Louisville and yes this Ali’s hometown. But the town hall meeting in the Southwest Branch of the library was about goats.
Now I know a little about goats. It was the pandemic year and Amanda wanted to borrow these four goats for a few weeks from a local woman who was 46 weeks pregnant and her goats had eaten her property down to dirt. She used the wool to create her own thread to sew some really very lovely textiles. She showed up with the goats in the back seat of a grocery getter, a mini van like the one my friend George couldn’t get stolen from the heart of Hell’s Kitchen (before Hell’s Kitchen got all gentrified, back when it had grit and teeth and even the NYPD was scared to go in after dark). Goats will eat pretty much anything, including poison ivy, which is great. But the only other thing they do with rapid frequency besides eat is shit, little tiny bullets seeds of everything they eat, so they spread poison ivy at approximately the same rate that they eat it unless you keep up with the shit shoveling. We managed to keep them for about a week and a half before they had to go home. The four goats — Boone, Betty, Merlin, and Wally — used to live on the back porch and would stare at us through the windows, like they were watching TV. Chew, watch, and shit: like someone watching America’s Got Talent. They got out once when our housemate was taking out the garbage and didn’t close the gate completely. They stood at the end of the driveway like they were waiting on an Uber until my wife shook a coffee can of goat treats and they hustled straight back in.
So the town hall meeting went the way you’d expect. The metro council member, Jennifer Chappell (D-15) made it clear she did not write the updated ordinance that would make it impossible for anyone to keep goats because the new ordinance increased the minimum lot size. Clearly, it was written by someone whose experience with livestock was limited to a petting zoo, and Ms. Chappell struck the perfect tone of being slightly out of her depth but focused and interested in learning more. It’s only fair; either you know goats or you don’t know goats. The learning curve isn’t too steep, but you can definitely tell you’re on a rocky incline. The Best speakers were a man from an animal rescue, which is God’s Good Work as far as I’m concerned, and a woman who grew up on a farm in Western Kentucky who knew exactly the acreage required to be considered an urban farm by the USDA. There was one speaker who spoke quite articulately about his wife’s spiritual experience with sheep, which brought to mind the only quote I know from Thunder and The Moon, a maybe not real book once referenced in the British sitcom As Time Goes By:
“I am alone with my sheep. But my sheep are not alone with me.”1
But once the guy showed up talking about emotional support cockatiels and tanks of fish, Amanda and I left to go eat dinner at the Applebee’s on Preston Highway (we had a gift card), where the waiter tried to sell us Spectrum internet before taking our order. Gotta hustle, I suppose. I almost wanted to stay, but I got the feeling no one would ask the question that needed asking, nor would they ask the necessary follow up question:
“Who wrote the ordinance amendment? And who’s goat shit in their corn flakes?”
- As Time Goes By. Series 5, Episode 5. 1996. ↩︎