My water is over my bridge right now. I say that knowing there is literal water over literal bridges in parts of this country and that bridges and every other imaginable thing, along with people and animals and lands, are being bombed out of existence right now. But my water is over my bridge. I try to keep it under my bridge. That’s how I survive. Otherwise, I will be my own undoing, and I don’t want that. Kris Kristofferson says, “You don’t paddle against the current, you paddle with it. And if you get good at it, you throw away the oars.” I guess I’d better figure out how to paddle. I need to find some oars before I learn how to navigate the current without them. I think poetry might be my oars. It better be.

I think I’m done posting about Kris Kristofferson. It’s like my whole life has been a deck of cards precariously balanced, and he was one of those cards, so I’m moving pretty swiftly into old pain as my cards fall. I’ll clean up my timeline tomorrow. I just want to leave all my posts up until then.

There weren’t many good things about my childhood. Thinking I was going to grow up and marry Kris Kristofferson was one of them.

I’m sorry. I never thought about the fact that I’d one day have to live in a world without Kris Kristofferson. I was not prepared for this.

Animals know fear. I know that much.

I think I’m entrained on curve-billed thrashers singing in the morning as opposed to being entrained on dawn. That’s fine, I guess, since the thrashers are entrained on dawn. What bird will signal morning when I’m in Utah? I may need a curve-billed thrasher alarm.

I just earned twenty-two active zone minutes putting away the one hundred twenty-three diet sodas my husband brought home this morning. Apparently, they were on sale, so he bought one hundred twenty-two more than I asked for.

I asked my husband to run out and get me a diet soda. He came back with one hundred twenty-three sodas.

Say what you want to say and what you need to say when you want to say it and when you need to say it.

You never know what lives your poems are living outside you.

Who’s to say / how old I am / in poetry years.

The painters unwrapped my house while I napped on the sofa. I woke to sunlight turning my eyelids into glowing pools. I am reborn. I want nothing. I want everything.

I will not hyperfocus today. I will not hyperfocus today. I will not hyperfocus today.

I’m messing around with my poetry database again today. It’s not going very well because I’m pretty high. Our townhome quad is being painted, and the fumes have made their way inside our house. The new color is decidedly ’80s dusty rose, a real blast from the past. It was supposed to be copper. It’s not copper. But the older women who live in the three other townhomes absolutely love it, so I will try to love it, too.

For no apparent reason, Meta AI sent me a message describing the geologicial features of Douglas, Arizona.

I managed to send five poems to one literary journal. That only took about forty hours of work. Now, I have to eat.

I want to write a heartbreaking poem about a wombat, but I am too tired.

I revisited my Eastern Washington poems yesterday. Now, I’m aching for Eastern Washington. I never left. (I left before I arrived.) I took it with me when I left. (It wouldn’t come with me.) It asked me to stay. (I didn’t stay. It never asked me to.) I left myself in it. (I left it somewhere inside myself.) I left it. (It was already leaving me.) I drove away. (It drove me away.) I was moving. (I appeared to be in motion.) I wasn’t still. (I wasn’t in motion.) I was the one who moved. (It was the one that wasn’t still.) We are both still now. (We are both still moving.)

My husband woke early and made the world light before it was light.

Someone left the moon on all night.

I sit in the dark. A cricket sings in the courtyard. The moon is gone.

I’ll stir when the rufous-winged sparrow stops singing.

Lots of coyote talk this morning, too.

I heard a western screech owl this morning and got a recording of its call. I’ve never heard or seen an eastern of western screech owl before. All the birds were communicating because a Cooper’s hawk was in the area.

We’re on our way to Target to get a second weighted therapy dinosaur so we each have one and they can sit at our dining room table and hang out together. I am super excited. They may even have a tea party. Yes, we’re in our fifties. Between the two of us, we’ve been on this earth for one hundred seven years. I guess that makes us almost as old as dinosaurs.

Edited to note that the second weighted therapy creature we bought is a dragon, not a dinosaur.

Lizards seem to have time on their hands. I could have talked about this with my friend, but she’s been dead for twenty months. The last time we spoke, she said, “Of course bees play. Of course they do.” I want to tell her how lizards climb and cling and swim and glide and run and how one teases my dog every morning by hanging upside down on the patio screen. I don’t want to have time on my hands. I want someone to call about lizards, someone who birds land on and who rescues cats and dogs and names them after characters in books, someone who knows the hearts of animals because animals helped her survive the unsurvivable until she didn’t and was no longer an animal, no longer part of time.

The dead usher us toward death simply by being dead.

As soon as I think about sending my poems out, they quit glinting and turn into sand, sand, more sand, so much sand.

Facebook is trying to sell me on an AI boyfriend. I already have an OI husband: an autodidactic neuroatypical advocate, artist, composer, electronics wiz, gamer, hacker, mentor, musician, outdoor enthusiast, pet lover, and software engineer. Organic intelligence for the win.

I learned some Spanish today from my fellow Tucsonans: Chinga tu maga, no mas naranja.

Now that you’re a bird, not my father, I can look at you. I did that. I turned you into a bird.

If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Open this gate. Tear down this wall.