HEADNOTE
As a recovering journalist, I decided to write about the 2016 presidential election on a daily basis, covering it as a journalist might—from the February snows of Iowa to the November morning after Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump—but in poetry, not prose. Those daily dispatches were ultimately collected in the book Campaign. (Some were published in Plume, with an introduction, which you can find here.) In the nearly eight years between then and last August, I wrote little poetry, nothing save for the occasional occasional poem: weddings, birthdays, art openings, funerals. Other obligations and passions intervened. Late last summer, I tried to get back on the horse. And I found, with only one foot in the stirrup and to my shock, that the daily saddle still fit. Endurance art will make you butt sore, but also allows you to see (and survey) the territory from a different POV—because it keeps coming at you, ready or not. Uh-oh, the sun’s rising again! And if you fall off, you might stay tangled in the reins and get dragged behind, like the bad guy in those old Westerns. I ended up with 105 of these time-stamped dailies (No Cheating) before calling it quits. The thirteen picked here by Editor Lawless present the horse. Whether she rides like Big Red (Secretariat) or The Old Gray Mare depends on the jockey.
CLOCK FACE
The shadow of a parent
made by a bare bulb
on the bedroom wall
or flashlight sun
on the sidewalk
is always bigger
than the actual
person. The clock
tells you, and doesn’t,
how long you’ve got.
Tells you gravity’s
complaint, crow’s feet,
renegade cells. The sweep
hand drives you from now
the way guards sweep
guests from museums
before closing. You were
Mid-Century Modern once
but now plain old. Figuring
fractions used versus
not used—gas tank
ranging “F” to “E”
and water poured
glass to glass.
The pianist plays
too many notes because
she’ll soon have to stop.
You count the grandchildren
odds soberly, actuaryish,
while researching plots.
A sea turtle
cruises the reef
anciently, unconcerned
with the apprehension
of time or heat-
bleach memory.
You stand
in the well
of the house,
filibustering,
while everyone else
has gone home.
Wednesday, August 28, 2024 8:47 am
BITTERSWEET
Who put the sweet after the bitter? Based
on my limited life experience
when something’s both it’s flagrantly always
the reverse: tasty first, icky after.
A certain kiss before leaving the stage:
sweet’s the head and bitter’s the dropped-down tail.
If bitter was your port of entry you’d
close your fucking mouth. Or the memory
of “X” at that September airport curb:
parting was sweet sorrow and not sorrow
sweet. When trying to win a prize, no one
relishes being in the running once
named runner-up. Or watching the leaves fall
in fall—heart rising into your throat as kids
grow too fast burying, unburying
themselves in raked pyramids of purple,
russet, and gold. The bitter comes after:
you may never see them do that again.
Thursday August 29, 2024 12:09 pm
HE’S GONE
When a child disappears into the open jaw
of airport does it much matter how old he is?
He might be eight with a bright lanyard round his neck,
shepherded through Security by the agent,
anxious to grab how it all works from his window
seat: the flaps, the flashing runway lights, the way plains
morph into snowcapped mountains and then escaping
rivers, the meanings of warnings from the adults.
He might be ten years further, off to Alaska
to kill fish one summer and try his best to not
slice off his thumb on the line making salmon safe
for market—the summer he slept in a treehouse
and a rusted shipping container. Or today,
at dawn, two stuffed duffels and a ruck-worthy pack,
circling back cross-country for more schooling to save
what small slice of our home Sustainability
Management will afford him. Cycling back to us,
and leaving, the Circle Game continues, its chords
fresh-rusted echoes of Separation Canyon.
He goes and doesn’t look back. The answer is No.
Sunday, September 1, 2024 9:37 am
FURROWING
Every night I pack up this house for its journey
into night. Windows and curtains closed. Doors
locked, double-checked. Wooden slat blinds tilted
shut against the osmosis cold of ancient
single panes. I check the stovetop to make
sure nothing’s on invisible simmer.
I check the freezer/fridge doors to make sure
the morning’s not melted. I turn off all lights
save for the safety light in the Beautiful
Room and the outside light above the front
steps but that’s on a timer. I click closed
the ugly iron gate that’s been open
all day for FedEx, UPS and Alma
the mail lady. I listen for plump crows
shuffling and stamping loud the roof rocks they
traffic in, listen for the neighborhood
coyotes heading down the block to hunt.
Prudent home ownership or borderline
OCD you decide. All this rhythmic
ritual—is it fruitless, and the house
become each night a fruitless orchard, or
am I furrowing the field between today
and tomorrow, where we’ll wake up planted
the same and somehow secretly different?
Sunday, September 8, 2024 8:44 am
LIVE A LITTLE
During the big World War they fought in black
and white, my mother, as a child, grew
a Victory Garden in the vacant lot
down the block from her family’s cold water
flat. Chicago, 1944: rats,
streetcar dimes, every man a handsome hat.
A wrong word was met by a fresh mouthful
of soap from Papa, his belt reserved for her
nearly-blind brother. Gangster stories, wind
off the icicle-encrusted lake, pink
ballet ribbons, the dinner radio
trumpeting every advance and retreat.
She learned new words on her hands and knees from
newspapers keeping the kitchen floor clean.
Now, pushing ninety, with her pandemic
puppy—all grown into Dolly, fluffy
fat white sausage dog—she carefully canes
herself down the stairs under the Outer
Drive, through the dank dark tunnel, and rises
to the concrete shoreline for her daily
walk against oblivion. From there, wrestling
with her tangle of tethered glasses, she
can see where her first marriage failed, where she
found the second that saved her, near The Playboy
Building now stripped of its beaconing name.
She tries to avoid every sidewalk crack
which broke her own back: a spinal fusion
and staph, two-for-one hospital combo.
I met her there, in the solarium,
pushing her in her wheelchair across the
black and white checkered floor. For a forty-pound
first-memory-of-mom boy, it seemed like fun.
And it was, but now I see it wasn’t.
The lake says No: a grid of choppy white-
tipped waves, a quilted mattress of water,
a dead-still Vija Celmins drawing come
alive. You could create coordinates
and overlay a plot, ex and why, but
lives near over don’t hold water, let’s not.
They pour, they spill, they leak all over but
only backwards. Now that Putin flattened
her Papa’s birthplace, and Trump’s petty hatreds
crow triumphant, she finds her V-E Day
and V-J Day scrapbooks too painful to
peruse. When we talk every other day,
from so far away, I hold the tin-can
telephone we made in our Sixties bomb-
shelter up to my ear, to hear her say:
You’ll be proud of me. I’ve been asking those
Uber drivers to wait until I’m safe
inside just like you said. And if they do,
I tip them extra. Live a little, right?
Wednesday, November 13, 2024 12:47 pm
LETTER TO JULIAN CHARRIÈRE IN BERLIN
Dear Julian: You might be anywhere,
recording volcanos with magic mics
or deep-sea diving with your Fresnel lens
cyclops bright enough to scare sharks. I need
to tell you what’s happened here, hard for you
to get growing up a wild Swiss kid
exploring forests safe and free. Our new
bell cow is the old spray-painted orange one.
Our last guy’s teeth got so bad he couldn’t
even make sense of pasture grass and they
shot him right on the national news. So
the fields will burn now (not like the Miwok
did it) and all our prayerfully planted
seeds ripped out and derecho blown. Some folks
are taking it hard, closing their laptops,
cancelling The Times, turning off their TVs.
Every last damn swing state undecided
got interviewed but no one thought to ask
a single salmon, arctic fox, tern, bee
or beetle. Same with the milkweed, dogbane,
sedge root and bunch grass—all their ballots were
disqualified by the new Commissioner
who we’ve quickly learned to fear. Swing states no
longer play Count Basie, Duke Ellington,
Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman or Prez.
We’ve plowed the optimistic music under.
Rare earth metals quiver in abandoned
mines and uranium’s in heat again, lusting
for that big shovel. Your Body, My Choice
is the new boyman meme circulating
on X. If it seems plain bad from Berlin,
it’s worse. You could always go to a rave
but that won’t keep China out of Taiwan’s
knickers.
I fear the political art
will get worse too, and that’s saying something:
can we do worse than the wagon-train of dung
our bright century has already hard-packed?
At MIT and your Zurich ETH,
I hear a joint team just proved Theory buried
makes methane far faster than previously
thought and French Theory fastest of all, but
I digress. I should say not everything’s
bad. Murders are down and we’ve thrown our stank
mayor out the gay swinging saloon-doors
of The Barbary Coast. The skinny hunter
we call The Daylight Coyote still goes
down the block too early and comes back to
sleep too late but is gaining weight and looking
spry. When the November sun rises late
on the bay, the Golden Gate shines and sings
in stiff wind. And man, no town looks better
in the rain. I’m hoping the ocean might
surprise us with old weather this year, and
I can’t see the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch from my western window, even with
a squint. The tides stay strong and kids are out
there this glowy morning, learning how to
jibe and come about, how to slyly sail
into the wind, how to right their capsized boats.
All Best from Russian Hill. Much love, db
Sunday, November 17, 2024 11:11 am
LETTER TO SPENCER GLENDON IN BOSTON
Dear Spencer: When I heard the “Masterpiece
Theater” voice of the British robot nurse
who (which?) called from the hospital (actually
a server farm in Mongolia or
Wyoming) to “check in on me” and then
saw the MyChart message logging the call
as a Patient Contact Encounter, I thought
of how many days of your life you’ve worn
the thin bright plastic bracelet announcing
your birthdate and barcode, how often you’ve
been slid on your back like a slow-mo luger
down the two-tone corridors always painted
to enforce dull calm, how many times you’ve
heard the static burble of the nurses’
station interrupted by a Code Blue.
As dog years to our years, those days are weeks.
When we were walking that February
cemetery, you told me if they had
to open you up again they’d find a
smorgasbord of organs encased in poured
concrete. Let’s keep the jackhammer closet
locked and your wide chest-to-belly YKK
flesh zipper stitched shut. Specific oysters
here and there, the right music for dancing,
memories of the Bad Boy Pistons conjured
by a Celtics loss, Lisa always: you
marshal your defenses smartly against
the onslaught. One point five Celsius is
in our rear-view mirror and in this dream
we’re in the backseat, no one’s driving, and
Elon’s replaced the steering wheel with his
joystick penis. The car accelerates.
It’s time to woman the barricades, we
might think, but the millions wearing scarlet
lettered caps (in all caps) have removed them
from the streets and called their husbands to put down
the disturbance. Wondering what delicious
thing you’ll make for dinner tonight? David
Cronenberg’s teleportation device
still has flaws so I won’t be there. Alas.
When I was ten, north woods of Wisconsin,
someone gave me a plate of salmonella
and I went for a week to the Hayward
Hospital Bar & Grill. I shared a room
with a boy whose face had been lit up by
a backyard barbecue. We listened to
the Lumberjack World Championships on
the radio, our beds separated by
a single forest-green Army surplus
curtain. Of all the warm-blooded mammals
on this planet, I bet we’re the only
ones who do radio play-by-play of
tree climbing, sawing, chopping, boom-running
and logrolling, rolling, rolling, rolling.
From Olduvai Gorge to Sistine Chapel
to speed-climbing a bark-shaved tree for bread
on the radio, I’m wondering what our
probable future might be? I tried to
always listen hardest to hear if I
could hear the losers splash into the water,
having been spun off the log by the winners,
but I never could. Damn! Stay on the log
Spencer, long as you can, and keep spinning.
Sending love ahead of the cyclone. db
Tuesday November 19, 2024 11:13am
EACH DAWN THE DAY
The extra gear Icelandic ponies have.
Oil that fueled candles an unexpected
eight nights. Waffle cones for free, no questions.
That’s just three but wait there’s more: knife set that
stays perma-sharp, fresh ten on the sidewalk,
sneaky upgrade from cross-country steerage.
Sometimes all those college classes about
which was worse The Holocaust or Middle
Passage blind you to just plain miracles.
The way broken clouds knit the sky into
a cashmere blanket. The way snappy drum
majorettes throw their batons to the moon.
In the meantime here’s a coffee-table
book about coffee tables, a blue kite
that creates wind, your open mouth saying “Oh!”
Blood pressure too good for cuffs to count and
the dirty martini vending machine
at the carpark sparks the shrink’s disbelief.
Tell him kick rocks and go back to snorting
coke from the crevasse of Freud’s daughter’s best-
seller. Tell him here’s your id, idiot.
Art’s no science and we’re all looking for
more. Because. Because each dawn the day comes
at you like the crazy guy with the knife
full of love in the street shouting Do This Now.
Wednesday, January 15, 2025 7:59 am
THE RIVER
In every big-box parking lot, state house
and placeless now of the oiled internet,
frothed shouting rules the waves. Pulpit soapbox
and streaming single, everything is mixed
to be louder than everything else. I
wander those lots and the greasy, mouse-clicked
creases, shuffling my feet and voting
with my cursor, searching for a different way.
The way border collies lead from behind.
The way weeping willows drink the river.
Monday, January 20, 2025 6:15 am
KINGDOM OF PAIN
A drive-over, toothed gate at the rental
lot, letting it enter but not exit.
A private island for one. Visitors
can’t visit. Each new map is out of date.
The R&D opportunity-set
with the single biggest juiciest TAM.
What your pals ask about to ask about.
You answer in a weird foreign language.
The thing that barks and barks and when you scratch
it under its ears still barks, whines, and wails.
This is not at all a satisfying
way to conclude a poem about pain. True.
But it does drive home the imitative
fallacy in all its bankrupt splendor.
Friday, January 24, 2025 6:49 am
FORECAST
This certain gray the sky betrays makes
today a good day for curling up with
your failures on the bed. Rain falls straight down
then sideways, gives up, redoubles falling
in angled hammer, the whim of forces
that keep themselves unseen and busy making
trouble. You’re told the seeds must get from place
to place. You’re told with time there will be sweet
flowers to embrace. You bring those flowers
inside to brighten breakfast in your mind
while they buried grow in concrete gardens
behind houses with their backs turned, asleep.
Sunday, February 2, 2025 9:23 am
PATIENT CONTACT ENCOUNTER
A patient contact
encounter
is an interaction
between a patient
and a healthcare
provider.
It can take place
in person or
electronically.
Examples of Patient
Contact Encounters:
Inpatient or outpatient
visit. Telephone
consultation. Specimen
examination. Film
review. Walk-in visit.
Outreach appointment.
Encounter Characteristics:
Encounters can be
billable or
non-billable.
Encounters can take place
in various locations,
such as office, home, or
electronically.
Encounters can vary
in length and detail
depending on local
procedures.
Encounters can include
a series of visits
or a single patient
interaction.
Encounter Types:
A patient may have
one physical health
encounter and one
behavioral health
encounter on the same
day. Dental services
are limited to one
dental encounter
per date of service.
Encounter Management:
Encounter forms, also known
as superbills,
are medical forms
that document a patient’s
visit using codes
for diagnoses,
procedures,
and services
rendered.
When managing
difficult patient
encounters, you can
try to: Apologize
if you are running
late. Encourage
the patient to talk
about their fears.
Assess if the patient’s
fears are appropriate.
Ask for assistance
if you feel
at risk.
Sunday, February 23, 2025 7:47 am
NEARLY LAST WORDS
Today the bus of nothing pulled into
the depot of everything just like wise
men said would happen. Camus or was it
Kierkegaard, Dean Young, Newt Minnow, Kristi
Noem or seventeen swamis on corporate
retreat at the Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay?
The root of pundit is the punchbowl drunk
at the party, underpants coming out
of his mouth. All this hushed talk of Elders
infuriates: they got us into this
mess to begin with. The Founding Mothers
only fucked the Founding Fathers thinking
of England, asking not what their country
could do for them. Children appeared, some dead
but most alive as baby snakes fanging
the life out of a rat. Just then in walked
not Bud but pistol-packing James Cagney
treating his moll rough like she liked it prove
otherwise. Prove gazelles have no weekends.
Prove reform’s the new word for sabotage,
a mirrored man with a ketamine hole
in his heart holding the glitzy chainsaw
high overhead in a Roman Salute
to the roar of the ballroom bloodthirst crowd.
Tilt. The flop might send you all-in, or out.
The river announces the state of the
union such as it is. Bob Marley was
pot committed which is why he could say
every little thing gonna be all right.
Melanoma proved him wrong but that’s why
we need singers making wrong right daily.
Alt right’s alt no more: where’s the new Command
key to control our probable future?
The snare traps Rabbit on the fourth chorus.
Duke announces his next number. Tuxes
penguin the bandstand, ready for the jump
tune, a westbound locomotive smoking
out of here in highball mode, double kick.
On the horizon, the aching sunset
in a methane flare. Always be closing.
Tomorrow the bus of everything will
pull into the depot of nothing, and
passengers will cast their secret ballots
to determine true the rest of your life.
for Dan Weiss
Sunday, February 23, 2025 11:33 am
