Dear Diary

"I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!"

Emily Dickinson, they say, wrote
that poem and more for the drawer;
like a diary, she was lockable
and secret, but now

we touch-of-a-button publish
any trivial or revealing
thought in a WorldWideWeb log --

like Oscar Wilde, we keep a diary
to have something scandalous to read
on the cyber-train.

There is no bog
of admiring readers, only the Blog
and a hell of a lot
of writers croaking their name,
I suspect.

Aisha

Why am I here?

I am here
because Colin
persuaded me.

So now it is up to someone
else to dissuade me.

Today's blog is about my neighbour
ten floors up. We met on the bench
outside. He visited his uncle's grave
the other day.

My neighbour is 75.
A union boss. Keeps up
with the news, keeps fit, dresses
cool and casual.

He only draws the line
at learning how to go
on the Internet.

All those years he lived
with his uncle who brought
him up,
my neighbour called him
The Old Man.

It seemed the right description
for a bent man
in mothballed cheviot suits
on Sundays.

Looking at the grave-stone, he was struck
by the inscription
under cross and name. That
Old Old Man
had died
at 68.

Aisha

Anyone for WeBlog?

Why am I here?
I recently read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.
It delighted me.
And so
I googled him.
I see he keeps a blog -- and so I go to find out what the hell a blog is.

And I realize a blog is that thing I despise: a journal.

I despise journals because they tell us everything, everything, everything.
Where is the poetry in that?

Aisha