"If This is a Man" by Primo Levi

     You who live safe
     In your warm houses,
     You who find, returning in the evening,
     Hot food and friendly faces:

     Consider if this is a man
     Who works in the mud,
     Who does not know peace,
     Who fights for a scrap of bread,
     Who dies because of a yes or a no.
     Consider if this is a woman
     Without hair and without name,
     With no more strength to remember,
     Her eyes empty and her womb cold
     Like a frog in winter.

     Meditate that this came about:
     I command these words to you.
     Carve them in your hearts
     At home, in the street,
     Going to bed, rising;
     Repeat them to your children.

     Or may your house fall apart,
     May illness impede you,
     May your children turn their faces from you.

"This Dark Star" by A. Monaghan

This dark star is all sadness, all sorrow.
It is blinding, deafening and unforgiving,
offers no light, no sound and no relief,
to the one caught in it's orbit.
Like a door of thick, heavy glass.
Frosted and warped, distorting all reality,
it reduces the entire cosmos into
a single dot of pure black pain...an atom of despair.
a black hole that sucks everything into
an eternal and endless night,
shooting cold shards of ice
to pierce the heart and freeze the soul.
This dark star is always present,
it has no future and no past.
It is the weight of the whole of creation
pressing and diminishing everything
into a drowned nothing,
in a soulless and drowned world.

"Blue Heaven" by A.Monaghan

Sparks of blue heaven
release seas of tranquility.

The sense memory of childhood,
blooms to an overwhelming innocence.

It carries me on the shoulders
of a huge and calm, rolling wave.

"The Family Goat" by A. Monaghan

“I step across the little brook to feed the family goat,
And, am grateful this small waterway, does not require a boat.

I often sit and contemplate him standing in his field,
And marvel at the produce that this little goat can yield.

He must be very happy in his little bit of pasture,
For, the milk & cheese he has offered up, is twice as much as last year.”

Written in tribute to and in the the style off William McConagall.

*William Topaz McGonagall (10 March 1825 – 29 September 1902)
Scottish weaver and amateur poet and actor. He won notoriety as a singularly bad poet who exhibited no recognition or concern of his peers’ opinions of his work. He wrote some 200 poems, including the infamous “Tay Bridge Disaster”, which are widely regarded as some of the worst in British history. His influence has been sighted by Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Billy Connolly, among others.

Charles Bukowski – "If You are Going to Try..."

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

Charles 'Hank' Bukowski. August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994