Saturday night afterglow on the Gulf of Mexico.

I am grieving the barbarism that is going to unfurl from all this. People are going to die. Livelihoods gone. All to feed a corrupt kleptocracy. I see every day up close how different it is from the first time around. There are no guardrails. A disaster. I’m sorry we have to live through this.

Last night on Stevenson Creek.

Now I’m at chapter 61 of Moby-Dick. I took a 🚲 ride to Old Clearwater Bay tonight. Melville makes you notice the sea more closely.

My rereading of Moby Dick continues. What a vastly entertaining & philosophically profound novel it is, Melville is like a high art soap opera writer, each chapter pulling you into the next.

Gulf of Mexico moonrise on Indian Rocks Beach tonight.

Cambridge Common (poem draft, 4/17/25)

Philip Lamantia (1967/2025)

In the rail yards on tonight’s ride 🚲

Mourning doves connect me to old memories of hearing them as a kid in the trees in Massachusetts.

Afterglow sentinels

Trump is a Russian asset.

It’s my patriotic duty to denounce traitors like Trump and Musk, who are working for Putin.

The line can sustain itself in the wind- swept landscape of hills & valleys where are we on this map? I followed the route along the wood Place holders in Could one be put together from memory, the Gulf air

Sunday night downtown

Stephen Spender (1933)

A poem by Patricia Guzmán (Caracas, 1960-2025), in my English translation. R.I.P.

MAGA is a fascist coup d’état.

Patricia Guzmán (1960-2025)

Saturdays are for the Grateful Dead.

You can see Venus tonight over the Gulf of Mexico, here in Clearwater.

One thing I like about poetry is that it’s absolutely humble.

A coup d’état just happened in Venezuela today. 🇻🇪 Death to Chavismo!

Poem draft

Downtown Sunday night

“The vagabond who’s rapping at your door Is standing in the clothes that you once wore”

Golden Gulf tonight on Indian Rocks beach

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a Howard Johnson’s in Bourne, MA, right as you crossed the bridge onto Cape Cod. I remember stopping there sometimes with my parents or my grandmother, on the way to or from the Cape.

Songs in the Key of Life

Elon Musk is a Nazi.

To see who they value, pay attention to their words. School massacres are labeled "mass shootings. Street executions are described as "officer-involved shootings." But the killing of a CEO is immediately called "terrorism."

Fog clinging to the hills and branches.

“On the Leeds side streets that you slip down Provincial towns you jog 'round”

When I was just starting to read and write poetry back in the early 1990s, across the Bay at USF Tampa, I was lucky to encounter the poetry of Octavio Paz, as well the English translations of his work by Eliot Weinberger.

Diane di Prima’s final edition of her long poem Revolutionary Letters (2021) is Poundian in how the book is a (political) autobiography written over a lifetime, using the poem to filter, comment on & evoke the current age as the poet herself lives it.

Diane di Prima (2021)

One of my favorite Jerry Garcia songs is “Standing on the Moon,” which I saw the Dead play a couple times, I can’t remember exactly where: “I see all of Southeast Asia I can see El Salvador I hear the cries of children And the other songs of war”

The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp. Derek Walcott

I just heard that Nikki Giovanni has joined the ancestors. What saddening news. I taught her poems yet again this semester & doing so was one of the highlights of the class. She was my favorite poet as a child & remains a favorite. May she rest in poetry always - Nikki Giovanni

My respect & admiration for the people of Syria, who have defeated the dictator Assad.

The fall of Assad gives me hope that one day Maduro will fall in Venezuela. 🇻🇪

“Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize “The stars are words” and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too.” (Jack Kerouac)

I’ve been writing a series of poems about music, based on concerts I’ve attended or musicians who’ve influenced my life. Today I’m typing up a 2nd poem about the Grateful Dead. My poem “Alice Coltrane” from this ms. was published a few months ago in Boston at Arts Fuse: artsfuse.org/291213/weekl...

Two moons & a planet on tonight’s bike ride.

Gulf moon

Great find today, the paperback of Auster’s final novel, I’ll interrupt my reading of Moby-Dick to start this tonight.

I’m rereading Moby-Dick for the first time since 1991, and now I think it’s an epic poem, an athletic feat of creation how he wrote it by hand. The relatively short chapters allow for sudden shifts in the narrative, and Melville often sounds Whitmanic in his sentences, with an encyclopedic tendency.

“Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an indifferent air…” (Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 27)

Sand Key bridge and the intracoastal waterway tonight