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"Let us not look back in anger - nor forward in fear - but around in awareness." - James Thurber, A day in the life, Day tripper, Four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire, Not Wednesday - Thursday
Days by Billy Collins
Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.
Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.
Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow
on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.
No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday
you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday’s saucer
without the slightest clink.
Esme's Cloud 
This is superb; tragi-comic perhaps – the irony of being desperate to live yet another day in desperation.
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I’m glad you enjoyed it H. “the irony of being desperate to live yet another day in desperation.” – I thought it was all rather upbeat actually laughs – all of us tottering, each day another stick removed from the Ker-plunk set, yet still, he knows most of us want more. ‘Go on then, I’ll balance another cup, and maybe spin a saucer tomorrow, and the day after that…well… – look ma – I’m a magician!’
This is one of the joys of poetry for me. The different angles taken on the same words by the audience. That’s where the magic really lies I think. Dull poetry is easy on the eyes and mind. There’s nothing to see there much – move along people, don’t you have homes to go to?! The readers nod listlessly and wander off. The best stuff spins.
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Well, there is perhaps(?) a hesitancy suggested in the opening line, when he says ‘no doubt’ – something we often politely say when we ourselves are uncertain of the matter in hand, or contrarily disposed, as often as we do when we are sure or in agreement. Then there is the whole imagery of precariousness, and the admission of hope and trepidation – ‘holding your breath’. Perhaps the second verse prefigures the dual meanings we respectively have taken – on the one hand ‘cold’ and ‘heavy’, the ‘masonry of ice’, yet on the other the bright and sunny uplands?
Hariod juggling a cup of green tea and Brian Sewell’s ‘Sleeping with dogs’
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Absolutely. I’d say you have described a very ‘fine balance’ there H. nods.
(Green tea is lovely mind you)
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