There is never enough time in a day...
A week...
A year...
A life...
We wish days will pass
And squint towards days to come,
But the day we have here,
Today,
Is as perfect as any
one.
Mini micro existential crisis
Make my pen indecisive.
Slow down.
Appreciate today.
How shall I remember tomorrow?
6 Feb: "Some People" by Rita Ann Higgins
Some people know what it’s like,
to be called a cunt in front
of their children
to be short for the rent
to be short for the light
to be short for school books
to wait in Community Welfare
waiting-rooms full of smoke
to wait two years to have a
tooth looked at
to wait another two years to
have a tooth out (the same tooth)
to be half strangled by your
varicose veins, but you’re
198th on the list
to talk into a banana on a
jobsearch scheme
to talk into a banana in a
jobsearch dream
to be out of work
to be out of money
to be out of fashion
to be out of friends
to be in for the Vincent de
Paul man
to be in space for the milk
man
(sorry, mammy isn’t in today
she’s gone to Mars for the weekend)
to be in Puerto Rico this
week for the blanket man
to be in Puerto Rico next
week for the blanket man
to be dead for the coal man
(sorry, mammy passed away in
her sleep, overdose of coal
in the teapot)
to be in hospital unconscious
for the rent man
(St Judes ward 4th floor)
to be second-hand
to be second-class
to be no class
to be looked down on
to be walked on
to be pissed on
to be shat on
and other people don’t.
5 Feb: At the Restaurant by Stephen Dunn
Six people are too many
people
and a public place the wrong
place
for what you're thinking--
stop this now.
Who do you think you are?
The duck à l'orange is
spectacular,
the flan the best in town.
But there among your friends
is the unspoken, as ever,
chatter and gaiety its
familiar song.
And there's your chronic
emptiness
spiraling upward in search of
words
you'll dare not say
without irony.
You should have stayed at
home.
It's part of the social
contract
to seem to be where your body
is,
and you've been elsewhere
like this,
for Christ's sake, countless
times;
behave, feign.
Certainly you believe a part
of decency
is to overlook, to let pass?
Praise the Caesar salad.
Praise Susan's
black dress, Paul's promotion
and raise.
Inexcusable, the slaughter in
this world.
Insufficient, the merely
decent man.
4 Feb: The Sirens by Lawrence Raab
After a while we got tired of
singing.
One morning out on the rocks
with not a ship in sight, we all
felt it—
a certain weariness, a malaise,
if you will. We felt it together,
sympathy having become
one of the finer aspects
of our nature. We’ve drifted apart
since those days, yet we’re happy
being remembered as impossible
to resist. The legends used to claim
we knew the future as well—all things
which shall be hereafter upon the earth,
as our song put it. Everyone only
assumed
we were beautiful. But we were, and
are,
though not unlike so many other
women now, those who promise much
less,
but let you live. It was a relief
to give up our powers willingly.
That didn’t happen often in our
world,
where the gods went on amusing
themselves
with their meddling, and the hero
plowed ahead, lashed to the mast,
dying to be tempted. Did we enjoy
the clamor
of shipwreck? The cries of the
disillusioned?
It was our job, our particular
talent.
We weren’t supposed to want anything
else.
3 Feb: Beggar’s Song By Gregory Orr
Here’s a seed. Food
for a week. Cow skull
in the pasture; back room
where the brain was:
spacious hut for me.
Small then, and smaller.
My desire’s to stay alive
and be no larger
than a sliver
lodged in my own heart.
And if the heart’s a rock
I’ll whack it with this tin
cup and eat the sparks,
always screaming, always
screaming for more.
2 Feb: The essential by Aleksandar Ristović
I was not allowed to live my
life,
so I pretended to be dead
and interested solely in
things
a dead man could be
interested in:
petrified reptiles,
museum bric-à-brac,
fake evidence passed off as
truth.
I felt a great need to be
really dead,
and so at all times I wore
a mask made of wood
on which someone occasionally
drew,
with colored pencils,
the look of contentment,
impatience, desire, bliss,
or the look of someone who is
thinking
about an entirely different
matter.
1 Feb: The Witch's Story by Lawrence Raab
The Witch's Story - Lawrence Raab
Everything you have heard about me
is true, or true enough.
You shouldn’t think
I’d change my story now.
A stubborn, willful little girl
comes sneaking
around my house, peering
in all the windows. She’s disobeyed
her parents, who knew
where the witch lived. “If you go,
you’re not our daughter any more.”
That’s what they told her. I have
my ways of knowing. All pale
and trembly then, she knocks at my door.
“Why are you so pale?”
I ask, although of course
I know that too.
She'd seen what she’d seen—
a green man on the stairs, and the other one,
the red one, and then the devil himself
with his head on fire, which was me,
the witch in her true ornament, as I
like to put it. Oh, she’d seen what she needed
to send her running home
but she walked right in, which is the part
I never understand completely. Maybe
she believed, just then,
that she was no one’s daughter any more,
and had to take her chances, poor thing,
inside with me. “So you’ve come
to brighten up my house,”
I said, and changed her into a log.
It was an easy trick, and gave me little pleasure.
But I’d been waiting all day.
I was cold, and even that
small fire was bright, and warm enough.
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