in parentheses

“Pretty Little Lies” and Other Works by B. Macnair

Ben Macnair is an award-winning poet and playwright from Staffordshire in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @benmacnair

B. Macnair has been previously featured by In Parentheses.

Pretty Little Lies

All of the Pretty Little Lies.
Are they better than all of the ugly big truths?
Would it be good to be like an Ostrich,
burying our heads in the sand,
ignoring things, believing the pretty little lies?
Or do we rip of the plaster,
expose, the soft delicate skin,
and let it heal by itself
as nature, rather than man, intended?

An Unexpected Adventure

We do not know where we will end up.
Foot following foot, day following day, year following year.
Each different, but surprisingly similar to everyone else’s.
The same words, and different meanings.
The same decisions, but different outcomes.
The films are always different to the reality,
each day, every word,
taking us forward,
an unexpected adventure.

Let Me Go

Let me go to the Pub.
Let me go to the Park.
Let me go to Work.
Let me go to see a play.
Let me go to see a band.
Let me go to see a friend, and have a conversation about nothing.
Let me go on a blind date, and talk about everything.
Let me go and find something.
Let me go to do anything.

Velvet Merkin

Velvet Merkin hit the stage at 8.00pm sharp, and sound flat. These ones go up to 11. They play their three songs, Evil Dead Red,Vampire Blood, and Substance Abuse, before Mavis realises that one again, Dave, her blithering idiot of a husband, has booked the wrong band for their wedding.

From the Editor:

We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.

Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?

The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.

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