Irony is when you exit the dry cleaner and a HUGE flock of birds IMMEDIATELY takes flight and poop-bombs you like you were Dresden — which could NECESSITATE A SUBSEQUENT DRY CLEANING. (I actually do need to throw my jacket in the washer now.)
This is collusion. That lady feeds the birds with a portion of her profits. I’ll bet there are rows of feeders on the roof.
Is this the haunted Nail Salon & Spa? It’s even named for NYC, which is where Stephen King’s dooming eponymous hotel room tormented poor Mike Enslin.
That’s some synchronicity worthy of The Dark Tower. FOLLOW THE PATH OF THE BEAM.
You KNOW how I love puns and portmanteaus, etc., etc.
Someone just called me “Nolandsman” and I am over the moon.
Why did biology class never teach us to interpret the weird sounds our bodies would start making at around age 52? Instead it was all about the pistils and the stamens and the mitochondria and the cell division.
I swear to you, something in my left flank just made a noise like half a whippoorwill call — but with a wistful timbre to it.
If I call my doctor tomorrow and ask him about wistful-whippoorwill-kidney, he’s going to dump me as a patient. Because he’s put up with a lot of shit up until now.
Well, here’s a nice way to start the year — I found out this morning that my poetry was included in Cooch Behar Magazine’s latest anthology, World of Poetry.
You can find it right here over at Amazon.
Thanks, as always, to Editor Sourav Sarkar for featuring my work in yet another wonderful poetry book from India!
⚠ WARNING — THIS POST MAY CONTAIN GRAPHIC OR DISTURBING IMAGERY. ⚠ Is it any wonder that I am happier as an adult? The first picture below was taken in the early 1980’s. The latter was taken a couple of days ago.
Granted, I’m not exactly Chris Hemsworth now, but ya gotta admit that 53-year-old me is a damn sight better looking than 13-year-old me. Adolescent Eric looks like a cross between an anemic Oscar Wilde and an accursed species of upright, hairless goat.
“Thanks for the trauma!” I told my sister after she texted it to me.
“It’s what I’m here for,” she told me.
Wishing all of you Happiness, Health and Prosperity in 2026!
French New Year’s greeting card, 1910
The past year was the best ever for poetry and commentary, with publications in the United States, Britain, Ireland, Germany, India and Bangladesh — along with a short story publication in Chile.
You can find all the links to my 2025 poetry and commentary at the link below. Thanks for coming along for the ride. 🙂
I’m so happy to share here tonight that the Poetry Hall quarterly bilingual journal again published three of my poems today in Issue 30. The poems selected were “Milky Way Haiku” (“银河俳句”), “Demurring Haiku” (“谦拒俳句”) and “Blood-Moon Haiku” (“血月俳句”). As always, they appear in the journal in both English and Chinese.
You can find Issue 30 right here at Amazon.
Thank you, once again, to Editor-in-Chief Xu Yingcai and translator Zhang Ning for allowing me to see my writing appear in this distinguished international literary journal!
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 