Tag Archives: writing

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, poetry, prose, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 2.23.26

A cold turn of weather and an opening road.

Though it’s incorrect to call the road opening. The road has always been there. Whittled down as I am by the world, whittled down to taking the offensive, when all I wanted was to be left alone. But I am grateful I have not been abandoned. I have, in fact, been embraced by the wild wind, and so my course is set and blind.

And it’s all for her. For them. And, yes. Also for me.

The days can be
a good crisp winter apple
small and sweet
full of flavor
and the slightest hint
of spring.

Take each deliberate bite.

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

Daybook 2026 // Winter 2.16-2.19.26

2.16.26

We’re in the wet season, what is probably a fool’s spring, and the snow and ice have melted. The skunks have started mating and the peeps, I am told, are peeping in the Olmstead Parks.

I can’t prove it, but I think I am saved by love and by eating an apple a day and by a spiritual subroutine that operates in the deep programming of my mind. It’s been decades, but I have been, since I became aware, been working at making subtle changes to the key operating system, digging out errata programming and faulty subroutines. An apple a day and a perpetual search for poetry, neither of which disappoints me, will be what saves this machine. As the body wears out I replace parts with titanium and with words and someday all that will remain is a beating heart that bleeds language and whatever spare metal parts there are. And then someday, the words will erode away, get carried on the wind and they will find new hearts. And then the reconfiguration will be complete.


2.17.26

The year of the Fire Horse comes ‘round once every 60 years, or so says the internet, which has gone from a depository of all information to a badly organized big box store where the search agents are underpaid and unhelpful and the expiration dates are … flexible. The fireworks at midnight disturbed a neither deep nor restful sleep. I wish I could blame current events but I find that the world intrudes on my interior geography the way water soaks into river rocks: immersed long enough, some water does seep in through the pores. But I learned a long time ago that I do not carry the entire weight of the world. My share is only what seeps in, and what I allow to remain.

I’m too busy looking forward to look down. I only wish that this slight fever had accompanying dreams.


2.18.26

A fresh pot of coffee on the stove,
an apple, a pipe, and a shower
and the world moves on

2.19.26

Blinded By the Light // this life informed by a Manfred Mann song / a guitar and keyboard riff that beats like a heart that never stops // I do not stop / I do not stop // until someday it will all stop

the songs are right // this is just one big space ship and we / and we / are float// ing

—

my 20’s were the death cult years

I’ve gone a little crazy a few times,
to the great disappointment of people
surprised they never saw it coming

and it was in my 20’s I learned
most people are fine sharing their sorrows
but it doesn’t leave any room in them
to share someone else’s

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