The great thing about New Year's Eve is that we can all briefly pretend like next year will be better. Drinking allows that to be possible I guess. Also, stay off the roads tonight. It's amateur hour out there.

From a mountain top bright with snow I watch the peasants plant rice below. Like motes in a bleary eye or black counters on a go board they shift position as the day unfolds.

Several of his poems have been published as Saturday Poems in the Pittsburgh- Post Gazette and the Thomas Merton Center of Pittsburgh has published several of his poems in NewPeople.

Penny for you thought Nickel for your soul The band is tuning the instruments Bass drum banging, boom boom boom Our saxophonist refuses to repent For touching the violinist When alone in the practice room They are practicing patriotic melodies Star Spangle Banner America the Beautiful God Save the Queen? Such madness this must be a dream Or to the aware A nightmare At half time the band marches forth As one we rise to stand To salute Old Glory for all it's worth The land of the free! Remember the Maine and all that pain But forget Wounded Knee To Hell with Nat Turner and don't examine slavery Don't dare whisper out the Liberty Damn the British! Damn the Spanish! Damn the Mexicans! Damn the Indians! Damn the Kaiser! Damn the Japs! Dams those Nazis Damn them Reds Damn the Arabs! Damn the entire world except for me! They just hate our liberty Damn supposed to forget that ship And I let it ... (more)

You come to me like the wind As I see your proudest achievement A place where you can lack all shame This is the message she sends A friend's sadness I hear now on my way But the rain is too much to stop Through summer you had to keep it If true love is not of the mundane What does this say about the Sanctity of life? The fact I can only feel it when I think of your name Now I think of war The place for order in this scheme The shadow of nuclear death is ever present I, and my great wise friends propose That the solution is in community This is a modern adaptation of Aristotle's politics Applied to the wider arena Liam Hutchinson is a poet from Bath in the United Kingdom.

I promise to never leave you and I know you'll do the same, I feel as though I need you, my strange pleasure, my lovely pain. I was a teen when you came into my life, uninvited like a lunging pike.

Before our birth it deigned to shine to lend life worth both mine and thine. Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago.

Some days, you nail it hard and true to the waiting pagea almost taking off your own fingers with the force of the mental hammer-swing. On other occasions, it's like wresting an inner snake, who's fighting with all of its might from inching out slowly into the revealing outside light.

Daniel Jakopovich is a writer, researcher, vegan abolitionist and a peace campaigner. He was the founder and editor of the Novi Plamen journal for peace studies, politics and culture , and was a guest lecturer in Politics, Political Economy and Sociology at the University of Cambridge and at several other universities.

But no matter what environmentalists do, our best efforts are insufficient. We're losing badly, on every front.

People living now in Yemen's third largest city, Ta'iz, have endured unimaginable circumstances for the past three years. Civilians fear to go outside lest they be shot by a sniper or step on a land mine.

Apple just published a letter to customers apologizing for the "misunderstanding" around older iPhones being slowed down, following its recent admission that it was, in fact, slowing down older phones in order to compensate for degrading batteries. "We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down," says the company.