The trees and I are headed in the same direction: nowhere, but with dignity. Look what happens to the clouds. No fixed residence means no stable identity. To be a vagabond or vagrant is to become vague.
***
Even with the return of so-called standard time, it takes the sun until 7:36 to clear the ridgetop and strike me in my eye as I sit on the porch. This year it just so happens that the leaves are already down, except for the scarlet oaks that dot the ridge — a legacy of 19th-century forest fires. There’s a couple opposite the porch that still cling to their leaves, which are turning crimson in the sun. [Update three days later: the scarlet oaks are bare.]
***
this beetroot chai latte is actually not bad. i figured it would be horrific; that's why i ordered it. it's election day and i want my money back
— Dave Bonta (@morningporch) November 8, 2022
*
Night = enchantment, or what? Whenever I try to read my own work critically I hit a wall. And I feel this is a deep failing though i concede that it may also be a strength.
Just running on pure instinct used to worry me. But now i figure it’s ok as long as the writing is clear. Ambiguous but clear. Like black cherry sap.
***
I need to remember my original childhood spirit animals, Bugs Bunny and Bucky Beaver. Later supplemented by Mad magazine’s What-Me-Worry Kid. What deep truths might they reveal about me? I mean i worry a lot. But i do still have an overbite. Well spotted, my former fellow five-year-olds.
Perhaps I need to remember why i decided never to have kids.
*
When I reach my favorite ridgetop seat, I find it’s already taken:
This katydid is clearly on its last legs. I can go sit somewhere else. It needs all the heat from that rock it can get. And then maybe it’ll have enough strength to climb back up the tree, though its leafy green camouflage won’t work anymore.
It seems wrong that katydids don’t turn color before they fall, poor flightless things.
***
open table
the moon takes every seat…
Couplets like that are clearly just two-line haiku.
***
I am trying to get to a place ideologically where there’s no highbrow, middlebrow, or lowbrow anymore – just more refined and less refined approaches. For example, with forms of theater as disparate as WWE, Italian opera, and Japanese Noh, not to see one as inferior or superior to the others, just different arts for vastly different audiences. Basically I’m applying cultural relativism to the arts.
***
Working on a new videopoem for the first time in nearly a year. It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten many of my habits, which can’t hurt.
***
engorged tick—
blood moon
my ass