Tag Archives: Prose Poem

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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2024, essay

Things That Remain in Spite of Us

Dynamic Earth – Ocean Currents by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

Recent flooding brings to mind the 1997 flood… the first one I really remember. There have been others since. There will be more. That year, the Ohio River flooded. The town of Falmouth, Kentucky, was washed away: entire buildings moved off their foundations. The river was 52 feet above flood stage in Cincinnati. It reached 15.76 feet above flood stage in Louisville.

There was a year, I don’t remember which, that Triplett Creek flooded and the southwest end of town flooded. That same year, a drought caused a fire in the mountains above Morehead, Kentucky and they burned for what seemed like the entire summer. The mountains bore the scar for years.

I still dream of these things. It was a pivotal time for me. As I get older, I find myself more interesting in Things That Remain in Spite of Us: the mountains, the river. They bear the mark of our presence; but they remain. What gets washed away will be rebuilt… it won’t be the same, because it will carry the mark of the flood in spite of any attempt to erase it.

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2022, homeless, Louisville Stories, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, psychogeography, river life, the no-scape

shadow city / glistening city

I saw the great blue heron twice. The city beneath and beside the city peopled with broken dreamers. Stamped FAULTY and flushed away with dead fish and miscarried fetuses, they bring forth their dreams and sweet wine to keep warm against early winter kisses carried in on the wind with whitecaps and choppy waves.

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