Tag Archives: Prose Poem

2026, everyday words, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose, Prose Poem

one person’s truth is another’s annihilation

I remember the landscape of my old homeground by the absence of landmarks. Rolling east on the Appalachian Highway, the absence of green space shook my mental map and memory of the place. There used to be great draughts of space between Eastgate and the wild lands of southeast Ohio. It was the escape into a space that still felt unsettled and a little more free, a little more dangerous. The kind of place a person could test themselves and still breathe clean air and see the stars at night. Before the cellphone towers, before fiber optic tentacles and the empty promise of economic recovery. The only lies were the ones people told themselves, the ones from which great and terrible futures are written.


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2025, Autumn, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose, Prose Poem, psychogeography, travel

Was a time, I’d bring Fall home in my rucksack

During my traveling days, I preferred to go during transitional seasons. Fall was my favorite time, and I’d go north, against the migration of birds. I’d go to the mountains, or to big sky country, where the season unfurls earlier, go in search of the dying expressions of the leaves: red, orange, yellow, the resistant evergreens. There are lessons to be learned from the last gasp of beauty before the trees stand naked, bare armed against the coming winter.  It is possible to relearn the smell of the air before the weather changes, before rain; the cold prelude kiss of an early snowfall… things forgotten in an age of digitized hyper-realities and Hallmark memories of a man-made world that never really existed. And when I arrived back to home’s warm arms, I unpacked and set it free: the bright dying, the scent of the air.

It was the only homecoming gift I could think of that mattered.

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2025, everyday words, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, Prose Poem, river life

Reaching back out for the Real

don’t want life behind the paywall anymore, don’t want to nickel and dime my soul in the name of distraction masking itself as relaxation

maybe it’s working on a 110-year-old steam-powered memory machine — but I want to be able to cast my eye, reach out and set my hands upon tangible and touchable Life

not manufactured  by an accelerated learning enrolled AI

by an algorithm  that has no heart to feel rhythm and language — some facsimile of existence  programmed by  a programmed sociopath

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back to what’s  real

can’t hack a typewriter or a pen to paper, don’t want to be the tool of what was supposed to be a tool

I see the faces of God down on the river, don’t need to pray to the ghost in the machine

to reach out to me

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