20 Feb: "Life in a Day" by Jimmy Nameles

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.