They don’t know it, but the birds are competing to be the last bird I see in 2024.

Poems aren’t looking for advice or solutions. They don’t want to be told to see a therapist. They don’t give a rat’s ass about shaping up or shutting up or being shut down. Don’t treat poems like people, not even like the poets who wrote them, about whom you know little to nothing. The poems aren’t telling you all about the poet, not exactly (if at all). Poems are telling you about the poem. That’s what poems care about. Being poems.

Today has a stagnant-water vibe that I don’t particularly mind.

How do you not see that everything is everything?

I die and live, marking my days divined and madmade. This stoma of life strickens me. I am mummified.

(Trying my hand at some of the techniques Catullus uses in “Odi et Amo.”)

It really hurts to write about dead people and dead birds and dead lands.

My job right now is to hold my dog while she dreams.

The angel’s in the details, too.

This poem says you belong.

I dreamed words were written on my back, but I couldn’t read them because I didn’t have a mirror.

I woke up early. I feel like warm Dr Pepper.

May we all be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.

I will get your attention, and when I have your attention, I will speak.

The world is bad enough that my poems make sense in it now.

Muse it or lose it.

I have a muse. It’s me.

Winter hiking sounds as awful as floor sleeping or day working.

Every day, I break for this world and want to be broken.

The cow with a face like a skull is up on one of the steep rock formations near our house. Someone let her and the other cows I visited last week out to graze. I saw what I thought was an oddish set of brown and black rocks against the pale-green scrub. When I grabbed my binoculars for a closer look, the cow with a face like a skull was staring in my direction. What a surprise.

I dreamed I had talons for feet. Incredible talons.

I’m thankful for anyone who will sing me away from this world when the time comes for me to leave.

My earlier years should have been happy but weren’t. My later years shouldn’t be happy but are.

I’ve decided that I can write my way into belonging here in Southern Utah. If I write this place, I will be part of it. I insist that this is possible.