Guillermo Parra

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?

Correction: 1929

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.

Selected Works: Expanded Edition by José Antonio Ramos Sucre (Trans. Guillermo Parra) | Noemi Press

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

9 Venezuelan Books That Imagine Home from Abroad - Electric Literature These diaspora authors capture the intimate history and complex reality of Venezuela

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)

Good to see you tweeting out here in the astral plane!

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

‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian

Trump is a Russian asset.