Malbolge

By ROBERT BAGG

            We go through life regretting our mistakes.

            One savage quip that can’t be taken back,

            one breach of a friend’s trust is all it takes

            to wrench a lifelong friendship out of whack.

            Some people have an enviable knack

            for sensing when abruptly rising stakes

            demand they steer a colleague back on track,

            defend a friend when he’s under attack,

            or better, shut that damn fool up, for godsakes,                      

            before he makes another brainless crack—

            the kind a smirking frenemy makes

            whispering at a party, behind your back.

            We go through life repenting our mistakes,

            lamenting every virtue that we lack,

            enduring unrelenting conscience-quakes.

            We can’t avoid reliving our mistakes.

            One flashback to our youth is all it takes

            to summon all its nightmare moments back,

            a raucous chorus that calumniates

            us, when our children, friends, and soul mates

            gather around us—an accusatory pack

            whose fiery glare, without a word, creates

            a Hell that aches and sears and flagellates.

 

[Purchase Issue 12 here.]

Robert Bagg has published six books of poetry and nine translations of Sophocles and Euripides (staged worldwide). His Oedipus the King and Antigone are in The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur: A Biographical Study, coauthored with his wife, Mary Bagg, is out in February 2017.

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Malbolge

Related Posts

Contrail across blue sky

July 2025 Poetry Feature: New Poems by our Contributors

GEOFFREY BROCK
Sing, O furrow-browed youth, / of the contrails scoring the sky, / bright as lines of cocaine / until, as they age, the eye // loses them to the blue… / Sing of the thin-skinned plane / that made those ephemeral clouds, / and of all that each contains: // the countless faceless strangers

Fenway Park

Before They Traded Devers

AIDAN COOPER
I don’t know I’m not paying attention I’m crunching / peanut shells thinking Murakami began to write novels / because of baseball why don’t I / my dad’s grumpy / I’m vegetarian now & didn’t want a frank & yes it’s probably / a phase he’s probably right but it’s a good phase

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.