Happy birthday to the poet Rafael Cadenas, who turns 96 today in Caracas. Two of his poems in my English translation, from Typo magazine (2013). www.typomag.com/issue18/cade...

There’s a new, 52nd printing of the Penguin paperback of Pynchon’s Vineland (1990). One Battle After Another has got me wanting to reread this novel.

Colder weather & yesterday’s rain brought a deeper afterglow to the Gulf.

Walking in the holy forest this afternoon.

Pavement II (poem draft)

There are few albums as perfect as Meat is Murder (1985). I first heard it when I was at boarding school outside Boston in 1986, and the opening track “The Headmaster Ritual” felt oddly specific to my 15-year-old life at the time. “Mid-week on the playing fields…”

I wonder who made this trail in Flatwoods Forest in Thonotosassa?

Selfie w/ a book my great grandfather published in 1931,T.R. Ybarra’s biography Bolívar: The Passionate Warrior (New York: Ives Washburn Publisher), a talisman in my library. Ives Washburn published 2 other books by Ybarra.

Afterglow clouds like a Steal Your Face lightning bolt tonight.

In 2016 Noemi Press published my English translation of the Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930). I’m grateful the book is still in print. www.noemipress.org/catalog/poet...

A bridge from 1931 in Old Southeast St Pete yesterday

Looking across the Bay at Tampa from St. Pete

Gabriel Payares writes a list of 9 recommended books by contemporary Venezuelan writers in English translation. He includes my English translation of Eleonora Requena’s collection of poetry, Textos por fuera / Outside Texts (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022). 🇻🇪

Rest in peace, Bob Weir.

Poem draft fragment of “Grateful Dead,” the third one I’ve written w/ that title, about my years seeing them play between 1988-1994.

Intracoastal Gulf vibrations

The Smiths (poem draft, 12/15/25)

After reading the first chapter of Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, I’m already in love with this book.

Hello 55 and a full moon tonight. Hanging out with my parents in NYC c. 1973.

I finished reading Laura van den Berg’s novel State of Paradise (2024). I especially enjoyed its focus on the I-4 corridor of Florida as part of the novel’s landscape.

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