Some days the weather insists on being cheerful while you are not, and Anselm Hollo's "Bad Sunday" starts exactly there. It opens with a bare list of feelings, "Longing, anger, rage", and then an odd admission: "Feeling both desperate and boring." The expected word would be "bored." Whether "boring" is a slip or a choice, it turns the speaker into dull company for himself, so the misery comes with embarrassment. Then the sun arrives, in quotation marks: "brilliant / 'sunshiney' / day". The scare quotes and the babyish ending of "sunshiney" make the good weather sound sickly-sweet, almost mocking. The line break leaves "day" alone before the flat refusal, "I don't want it." What the speaker rejects is more than the weather. It is the pressure to feel fine.
The poem then swings from refusal to wanting, though what it wants is strange: "deranged jottings!" This is the only exclamation mark in the poem, so it carries the energy. "Jottings" is a modest word, suggesting quick, unpolished notes rather than finished verse. The speaker asks for permission to write badly, to get the mess down without tidying it.
The mess follows at once. "How to stop / envying / the beloved / the beloved's life?" is broken into short, stacked lines, and the repeated "the beloved" stutters like a thought going round in circles. The poem never says who the beloved is or why their life is enviable. That silence feels truthful, because a bad day rarely explains itself. The speaker is simply stuck on it.
Next comes a physical image: "Flat on back, / cursing the gods". It is a pose of defeat, but also a theatrical one, and the poem seems to know it, because the next thing it offers is "silly head music." The noise in his head is rendered in comic-strip sound effects: "big cat claws / striking POW, / pow, pow". The capitals shrink to lowercase, as if each blow were fading, and then the sound turns small and pitiful: "screech, dying mice." The poem sets a big cat against mice, hunter against hunted. Judging by the imagery, both could be parts of the same worn-out mind, one half attacking and the other squealing. The sounds themselves are harsh, with the hard *c* of "cat claws" and the scraping "screech."
The mock-epic climax is "General Misery / advancing / on Saigon of the Soul." Misery is promoted to a military rank, and "advancing" gets a line to itself, so we can almost hear the slow march. "Saigon" brings in the picture of a city about to fall to an invading force, and setting it next to "Soul" is deliberately inflated, since private gloom is dressed in the costume of a war. The poem is not fooled by its own drama. It stages the drama anyway.
That is why the ending works so well. "Yes, let's have / that, too." The tone is casual, like someone adding one more item to an order. The poem began with "I don't want it" and ends with "Yes, let's have," and the small word "too" does the work. The cats, the mice, the General and the invaded soul are all welcome, because they are exactly the deranged jottings the speaker asked for.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. Lines range from a single word ("day") to a full question, and the white space works like hesitation, a mind stopping and starting. The register jumps too, from blunt diagnosis ("Longing, anger, rage") to slang, comic-book noise, mock-heroic announcement and offhand speech. Nothing is smoothed into one voice, and that is the point.
The poem's significance lies in its honesty about a mood that has no dignity. It does not turn the bad Sunday into wisdom or promise to cure it. Instead it admits the self-pity, laughs at it, and lets it stay. By the end the poem has become what it asked for, a deranged jotting, and in making room for the misery it takes away some of its power.