Tag Archives: waking

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

Daybook 2026 // Winter 2.26.26

I relish the days I wake up with a cleanish slate. All I want before I first open my eyes is to feel her next to me. Around her, my entire geography takes form and becomes. And then the words, and then the noisy insistence of the day, the dogs, the words, one foot and then the next foot, finding glasses and on to coffee and tobacco and words. The world, the world, fast and faster, slow and slower, becomes and unbecomes, folds and unfolds

before the machinations
interfere. But that
is rare.

I feel for her to make sure I’m still waking into the same dream. Always the sensation in my limbs, the vestiges of dreams incomplete when the body has enough, when the mind that is me today decides to drive the body machine. The static from the back of the brain tunes in like an old radio dial, finds a station that rings clear and all I can hope for some days

is that it’s a song: The Beatles or Lucinda Williams or The Bangles or Stone Temple Pilots or Lita Ford or Joe Strummer or [ ]

and not some news reel
that will bleed horror in the lens
before I even get my coffee and my first smoke of the day.

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2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, poetry, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.20.26

0530

The old merled dog wakes us at 0330. The plot against sleep continues through the winter. The winter is full of plots, real and imagined and at this early hour I can’t tell if it’s the one against my wife sleeping, the one against me sleeping, or the one in which the dogs crawl under the porch to take a shit. I may have to take up midnight fishing just to sleep properly again. The plots exchange themselves out of convenience, because now I’m certain the dog’s plot all along was to get me down to the basement. She knows I will give up and come down here, coffee and apple and tobacco and words. 

In my head, the plot unfolds in which I question why I bother getting out of bed, why the tired machine persists. The usefulness of a man is defined by the amount of money for which he exchanges his time between birth and death. These mornings of coffee and apple and tobacco and words I try to keep in mind that practice and faith in the mystical mechanics of the universe are enough. Ply the old ways. Fill the head with notions, jigger, then empty. Every line and phrase is a word cocktail, the output of a machine made for that purpose. The old merled dog knows nothing of this. Only that something drives her, too.

no one will know I ever arrived
until I’m gone
kicked along by some other current
a pebble 
gradually worn down
into bone dust

merled
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2023, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, psychogeography, the no-scape

all winters echo State Street 2012

wake wake from that
reoccurring dream
wandering a campus
a town a broken down
village cold empty beaches
overgrown quads
to a cold cold earth
memories
of a lonely Chicago
a ghost on State Street
forgotten
until Union Station opens
another warm dream

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