“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushed near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

Louise Erdrich
‘The Painted Drum’

found on morning city walk

no sanctity, cousin Ernie

Blendon pine sun

I AM DOOM

Cleveland October morning

mushrooms, in the middle

wandered at the shore

arrived here

guns misspell spoons

is he wearing a mask or is that blackface?

fellow party goer

Elvi in canoe

double rainbow in the city

cloudy moon evening

fitting, somehow

I killed an aggressive wasp this morning
with a copy of Mary Oliver's
American Primitive

last of the berries rasp

not quite awake or focusing my eyes

I have some moderate distress this morning when I realize that my Hawthorne and Hardy brain-files have gotten mixed up.

I take the cure - lay hands on Thomas' poetry. I learn the number of spines I have to contemplate before he falls open.

too sleepy to get the right one, I dreamt, unsettled

Last night on my way to drifting off, I suffered a compulsion to read t.l. kryss about sunflowers and leaving alone any arguments about color. My tired mind grabbed the wrong book (the one with the most bookmarks). Small pieces of paper fluttered all over the bed and the book dropped to my face again and again. I could not find purchase.

toad shaped toad

in the road

new garden companion

Vacation Math

she's watching you

I found this doll moderately disturbing

and then I saw

I should be surprised that a machine directed me

but instead I am moderately put-off and made weary by the prompt.

odd to know

odd to know the last time I listened to this
only I bet then it was the holiday weekend

note to myself

Elvis is an adjective.

garden companion

oh my

my favorite sycamore

two boots, two questions, one afternoon

do not need

this makes me sad

beautiful bloom on a plant I have not identified

if cheese were sentient

I'd be healthier

Dear Netflix,

Re: The "personalized" movie suggestion which was really a shameless publicitygrab.
 
I am afraid you are sadly mistaken to think I would enjoy that obviously bad movie.
And to be honest, I wish I could consider it a victory that you do not know me. But I cannot.

got my tags renewed

Some gum-chewing heavily eye-linered young woman with 3/4 length sleeves and a tattoo in intriguing script leading up her arm reading "Live "  ah, I couldn't see the rest of it and just wanted to get out of there so didn't ask, told me that it didn't matter that the incorrect county was listed on my registration.

She was wrong.

sometimes the difference

Sometimes the difference between a bad day and a not-so-bad day is remembering to take your favorite spoon to work to eat lunch.

And wearing socks that match your underpants but nothing else that you are wearing.

perspective

It is likely a mistake to think of my house as an adversary.