Well deck the halls and call it a holiday! A terrifying new age of the self-repairing machine is nearly upon us and I persist in writing haiku and obscure erasure poems, published mainly on my own blogs. I persist, in other words, in the face of full-on Christian authoritarianism verging on fascism, as a dilettante nature poet and backwoods flaneur. Which sounds unusual unless you’ve ever been to the Appalachians. This is a region that seems to specialize in weirdos of all descriptions, and I am proud to be one of them. I suppose as residents of a national sacrifice area, people develop an especially acute sense of our existential precarity: Rust-Belt rejects, spare parts for broken-down engines. And regardless, here in the United States of America, to live in any place for too long makes you weird. Where’s your ambition?! The Treasury Secretary says that if we can’t afford to live where we live, we can simply move elsewhere. But if there’s one thing fascists hate, it’s anything and anyone who doesn’t fit the mold. To them, a drone that acts as its own mechanic sounds absolutely brilliant, despite or perhaps because of its obvious disincentives for keeping humans around. This is a time for makers everywhere to rebel against the suffocating conformity driven by algorithms and an ecocidal, xenophobic police state. In 2026, I intend to double down on all the sorts of things that machines will never learn to do. In other words, I suppose, I resolve to be as human as humanly possible, and I invite you to join me in what seems like an extremely modest and achievable goal: simply continuing, against all odds, to be odd. Happy Holidays.

Almost any block of expressive English-language prose I’ve ever examined can be found to include one or more poems containing some reasonably sound and original insight, metaphor, or word-play. This is so persistently amazing to me as their discoverer that I am tempted to speculate that truths about the human condition might actually be encoded within the language itself!

But then I come down to earth and remember that this maybe only works because English grammar is so stripped-down and flexible. It’s worth speculating in how many other languages erasure poetry would even be feasible for more than a few heroic, novelty efforts. I refer to this suitability for erasure poetry as shlang, a word embedded in the phrase English language. A highly inflected language such as Russian could be said to have little shlang, whereas one with no real declensions and verbs that can be left out might have moderate to high levels of shlang, presuming the writing system is (or in the case of Japanese, can be) phonetic rather than symbolic.

Nevertheless, the mental model of discovery or sculpture rather than production ex nihilo offers, to me, a much more realistic sense of what it is we’re actually doing when we engage in any kind of creative writing: playing within preexisting mental and linguistic frameworks, even as we push to “make it new.” That wondrous feeling of rightness you get when you’re in the zone and hit upon some new-to-you formulation: if it feels as if it comes from outside you, that’s because it does, however thoroughly you’ve internalized the rhythms and patterns of the language, so that they seem as natural as your breathing and the normally unheard beat of your pulse.

And then there’s the way we read when we’re in writing mode, with full attention and the temporary submersion of the ego to the flow of words. I’m trying to make that my baseline for all the poetry reading I do. It’s actually not terribly difficult, compared to the effort of attentively reading a more workmanlike block of prose with an eye out for shlang. As usual, St. Emily said it best:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

At least, I thought it was facetious.

Yesterday morning as I headed out for our biweekly grocery shopping, I felt and heard a sudden clunk from the rear right tire, which promptly stopped turning just as I was coming past my house. The car is 18 years old and a bit rusty, it seems. Had the axle broken at 70 miles an hour on I-99, our mechanic-neighbor Eric cheerfully informed me, that would have sent me cartwheeling down the highway. So I spent the rest of the day feeling very lucky indeed.

In a world as full of beauty as it is of horror, gods exist so that people have somewhere to direct their gratitude for being alive: I’ve long believed this, and now I’m seeing how it plays out in my own life. By next year at this time, I’ll probably be babbling about how I have to learn to align my creative energies with the divine feminine. Pray for me.

I may not live a wild life, but I do live with wildlife. Like the squirrel this morning while I was sitting on the porch. I hear this sound of claws on metal from the top roof, then a BANG onto the porch roof, and a gray squirrel thumps down into the yard in front of me. The roof was wet with rain for the first time in nearly a month and this squirrel had clearly not factored that in to his or her calculations whilst traversing the roofline between the the eastern red cedar next to my front door and the black walnut out back. It shook itself off and headed back to the cedar tree to try again. Inspirational, really. Just like in some Disney movie, a forest creature was there to impart a valuable life lesson: Don’t try to cross a metal roof in your bare feet after a rain. Thanks, Squirrel!

Anyway. “Hiking” is so last century. Literally! Etymonline says (emphasis mine):

HIKE (v.)
1809, hyke “to walk vigorously,” an English dialectal word of unknown origin. A yike from 1736 answers to the sense. Not in widespread popular use until early 20c.

‘HIKE, v. to go away. It is generally used in a contemptuous sense. Ex. “Come, hike,” i.e. take yourself off; begone.’ —Rev. Robert Forby, “The Vocabulary of East Anglia,” London, 1830

Sense of “pull up” (as pants) first recorded 1873 in American English, and may be a variant of hitch; extended sense of “raise” (as wages) is 1867. Related: Hiked; hiking.

How typical that it was Americans who turned hiking into something aspirational: you’re going UP, and up is GOOD, so hiking must be this purifying, ennobling thing, a quasi-spiritual encounter with Nature, blah blah blah. NO. It’s the most basic form of human locomotion and should not be made into a special thing—a commodifiable leisure activity—because then it seems optional, rather than something that everyone who is able to should be doing every damn day for at least two hours. Many I’m sure will claim they don’t have the time, but the average person spends over four hours on their phone now, according to a new study, so whatever.

It’s getting dark earlier these days, of course, so an after-dinner walk does involve some level of comfort with darkness. Cue Robert Frost.

the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun

Adrienne Rich’s powerful poem is more necessary than ever. There is so much wreckage — and so much need for divers. Don’t despair, my writer and artist friends. There’s still a lot worth salvaging.

The best thing about my erasure poetry practice is that it allows me to exceed my own abilities as a poet on a fairly regular basis. Take today’s poem:

music ended
like a nest of shadows

we hear simply
the night

I still don’t quite understand this, and therefore I feel confident that, left to my own devices, it would never have occurred to me to write it. But I love its elusiveness. It has the quality of some of the Eastern European poetry I most admire, somehow simultaneously playful and glum.

And no doubt it’s in part thanks to my scattershot reading of poetry in translation that I was able to recognize this as a poem in the first place. But the relative briefness of the source material severely limited my options: that’s key to the success of this poem. I’ve had so many similar results from shorter entries over the past 12+ years of this project, that it’s made me more cautious in how I indulge myself with the longer entries, too, slowly building new quirk-recognizing muscles.

Here’s what I made from the same entry ten years ago:

After music,
the painter at last
is like an honest shadow
angry to hear of night.

Nice effort, earlier me. But you clearly have little idea what you’re doing yet. Therefore you’re overcompensating by trying too hard.

You need to work on letting go of your own authority in this shared authorship. Why should only Pepys get erased, and not yourself as well?

I am not a good person.

One thing I never anticipated about growing older is how attached I would become to ordinary possessions, how reluctant I am to replace things that genuinely need to be replaced. I tell myself that this is rational behavior: manufacturing is in a terrible state, that’s not my imagination! Whatever new thing I get will almost undoubtedly be worse. But, like, this perfectly ordinary pair of scissors that I’ve been using to trim my beard and mustache once or twice a week for the past 30 years is getting so dull now that it causes me actual physical pain, yet I still can’t bear the thought of replacing it. Fundamentally, I guess I just don’t hold with the passing of time. It’s wrong and I don’t like it.

Every summer for 6 or 7 years when I was a kid — so effectively forever — my paternal grandparents came and stayed in the old tenant house, which I currently occupy. They had this brilliant mid-century electric wall clock in the kitchen that remained in the house, along with many of their other things, for decades. At some point it got broken, and the kitchen hasn’t felt the same since. Two weeks ago, as I gazed at the spot where it used to hang, a thought popped into my head: eBay! I typed in something like “retro art deco electric wall clock yellow” and there it was, only three items down. Some guy in Jersey Shore had one he’d found in a garage and was asking $35 bucks for it. Couldn’t guarantee it still kept good time. I didn’t care; instant purchase. Turns out it does! The kitchen looks right again, and more importantly, I think, I have an analogue clock that I’ll see every day to remind me that time is cyclical and intrinsic to the rhythms of the cosmos, not simply an endless procession of interchangeable seconds.

I’m beyond grateful. From a haiku perspective, there’s so much wabi-sabi in old books like these. For one thing, they seem never to have had a single reader in their more than century of existence: the pages in most volumes, though yellowing, remain uncut. (And no, I’m not going to mutilate them to make analogue erasures. My dad was a librarian. He’d come back to haunt me! I’ll use photocopies if it comes to that.)

I record this here as a reminder to myself never to say no to local gigs, no matter how much they might cost me in nights of lost sleep. As Qoheleth says: Cast thy bread upon the waters.