It’s my birthday! Yesterday I told a friend I was waiting to publish until today so I could get attention and demand well wishes 😛. She said that was the most libra thing she’d ever heard.
Truthfully I just slept too late yesterday and missed my writing window. But since we’re here, if you happen to feel like doing me a birthday solid I have the perfect thing: fill out this Disco Diaries survey! I want to know what you experience when you visit.
As you may know, I was recently on a Great Plains road trip and I’m still buzzing thinking about the grasses and the skies and the bug sounds. This week’s poems come from that time. Let’s take a peek.
1. This sound ecology survey at Konza Prairie
A Poem Written by a Kansas State University Student, Although She Does Not Know It
I find the trail’s acoustic environment appealing
My attention is drawn to interesting sounds on the trail
Sounds on the trail make me want to linger
Sounds on the trail make me wonder about things
I am engrossed by the trail’s acoustic environment
All the sounds I have heard on the trail belong here
All the sounds merge to form a coherent acoustic environment
The sounds I am hearing seem to fit together quite naturally with this place
The acoustic environment suggests the size of this place is limitless
2. Lonesome prairie trees


Meet Daisy and Morticia. Curious how each is haunted by one tall piece of grass in the foreground. The Great Plains are wildly underrated.
3. Small town parades
If you haven’t read last week’s essay on Wakita, Oklahoma, it might make you happy if you did. In it I visit a tiny town’s proud parade, featuring an elderly couple, each in their 100s, waving from a slow-moving cart.
We are too overstimulated at all times. Letting the boring be grand at this parade gave me a reset.
4. Scribbling into notebooks after dark outside
When there is such a fury in you to write, when the pitch black of a fireless campsite makes you feel freer, when you have have have to remember this in the morning. You wake up and see:
I.
The horizon, a sandwich of delights
II.
Even the gargantuan droppings special, leather soft serve for a giant
III.
Sometimes I get stuck in my own cloud and I can’t see a way out
5. Old, cheap things
I bought this tent at Meijer for $40 a dozen years ago. It’s snot green and has a scotch-tape covered hole on the front flap. The inside smells like rain and mildew. The seams are beginning to rip. Somehow it’s always home to one single dead stink bug. It has traveled across the country several times and hopes to make it to Maine someday.
Happy belated birthday. :) I loved this.
Always so good!