But not right to the roots!

At last, I have discarded rotten fruit.
They say it’s hard, but I must disagree
Why! Old potatoes growing long white roots!

The old wives attempted myself to recruit
They say we spar but I do what suits me
At last, I have discarded all his loot

I rather fancied hunting Dad’s black boot.
They say aha but would you come to see
My cold relations wearing birthday suits!

I found poor Sylvia wrapped in winding sheets
Her Daddy barred her dying in his shoe.
She won the Prize but lost her children sweet

Some women say they  just desire a  brute.
Love is tardy when the wife is blue
If only she’d  turned down his  wedding suite

Love is hard but no worse than the flu
Life on guard is tense   but very now
Oh blast, I have discarded  the wrong lout
His hair was dyed but not right to the roots!

A rondel

DryS_BrimProbeTrio
Photos Mike Flemming copyright 2017

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondel_(poem)

Quote

A rondel is a verse form originating in French lyrical poetry of the 14th century. It was later used in the verse of other languages as well, such as English and Romanian. It is a variation of the rondeau consisting of two quatrains followed by a quintet (13 lines total) or a sestet (14 lines total). It is not to be confused with the roundel, a similar verse form with repeating refrain.

The first two lines of the first stanza are refrains, repeating as the last two lines of the second stanza and the third stanza. (Alternately, only the first line is repeated at the end of the final stanza). For instance, if A and B are the refrains, a rondel will have a rhyme scheme of ABba abAB abbaA(B)

The meter is open, but typically has eight syllables.

There are several variations of the rondel, and some inconsistencies. For example, sometimes only the first line of the poem is repeated at the end, or the second refrain may return at the end of the last stanza. Henry Austin Dobson provides the following example of a rondel:

See link for more

With dusty shredded leaves.

The gravity of loss brought me to earth
Beneath the rotting leaves, I lay with worms.
I wondered if I were of any worth

No more to be enchanted by love’s mirth,
I  with unnamed particles was turned.
The weight of loss bears down the heart to earth.

The weight of  love has readied us for birth
The fragments moulded with the love that burns.
I learned we need  not wonder  over  worth

My sorrow brought no guilt nor fear of wrath
I am both  sharp eyed eagle ,twisted worm.
In my little grave, I  loved the earth.

Like the adder, shocked into rebirth.
I from silent underworld had learned
Not to judge my soul nor think of worth.

I shall not  fear the flames of hell that burn.
When blackness is accepted, may one learn?
The weight of loss breaks down the soul to earth
With dusty shredded leaves, we then converse

We do not love their desire.

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What we love in other human
beings is the hoped for satisfaction
.of our desire.We do not love their
desire.If what we loved in them
was their desire, then we should
love them as ourself.

Simone Weil

Quoted in ” Tenebrae” by Geoffrey Hill

The intellect then lives, the heart is blind.

The blossom blooms, indifferent to man
It follows its design to reproduce.
And men complain, for men now rarely can;
Must sublimate their power to other use.

And yet we may in reveries of joy
Feel one with nature ,happy and in grace.
This mood can overwhelm the girls and boys
And like all living creatures, they embrace.

If we stray too far from origin
When we are disembodied into minds
We split ourselves to doubles, so to twin
The intellect then lives, the heart is blind.

Our bodies are not devils in their sin
We are our bodies  and should live therein

 

Why we feel tired: Quantum theory

DSC00036

“Among its many counter-intuitive ideas, quantum theory proposed that energy was not continuous but instead came in discrete packets (quanta) and that light could be described as both a wave and a stream of these quanta.”Extract from article in Guardian.

Energy comes in packets usually known in Britain as biscuits.

For grief itself is love that has remained.

When we lose our love we can’t prepare
Our  first defences keep us  from despair
So when your neighbours see your stricken face
They turn and your new image is erased.

 

Alone in a bleak landscape, we shun change;
No new saucepans or we are  deranged
The world must be preserved, not changed at all
A memento of our love before the Fall.

To  distant lands, we’re sent to serve our time
In that place of edges, borderlines.
When language fails  we talk in metaphors
We symbolise the missing  one who’s died

But after Auschwitz, how can I  complain?
For grief itself is love that has remained.

I can’t get your call.Please send a hint.

I’m sorry I can’t answer the phone.I have got earplugs in.
I can’t answer the phone. I  have lost the handset
I can’t take your call as the cat has swallowed my earplug and I need it.If you know how to get them out of a cat please leave a message, otherwise, I am not here in spirit.
I am dying my hair and I dropped the phone into the solution.I have to wait for it to dry.Still, it will match my hair.
I don’t take calls from politicians.
If you are selling Windows, I already have 10.
I have not been in a car accident.I have no car.Goodbye.
I can’t get your call.Please send a hint.

 

I’m undone

My brief excursion into springtime sun
The pleasure of the leaf buds palest green
This made my cold return and my eyes run.

I thought, while eating cheese, delight had come
But now my nose is leaking  like a drain
My great excursion into springtime sun!

The robin came inside and looked for him!
My spouse who died and caused my heart such pain
This made my cold return; my eyes still run.

I like to sit in silence when I’ m done.
The Rose of Sharon, will she bleed again?
My sad excursion into springtime sun!

The peace perceptible may one day come
But Europe with her conquests rides the slain.
This made my grief return; my wet eyes run.

The  Aryan Norsemen with their fierce disdain
Have conquered half the world and left it stained
And I, their daughter, from  those loins, have come
This makes my pain return  and I’m undone

 

What might be seen by all is seen by few.

Today the sky is misty with grey cloud.
Forsythia’s golden haze brightens my view.
All buds will open while the birds sing loud.

Lately, the small trees to winds did bow.
An attitude religious, as they knew.
Today the sky is misty with grey cloud.

The male beasts fight, with hormones well endowed.
The strongest stag will mate, he beats the queue.
Buds still open gently; birds sing loud.

The seeds will germinate in land well ploughed.
The farmhands’  faces sweat like flowers in dew.
The sky looks dull and dusty with grey cloud.

I wish that men and women were allowed
To leave their work and see the world renewed
See buds open , hear birds sing aloud.

What might be seen by all is seen by few.
The world created every day anew.
Today the sky is misty with full clouds.
Soft buds  open while the birds sing loud

It is red but it failed to excite her.

I tried to chat up a   lady
As men are now too young to see me
At first, she was kind
So I showed her my mind
It was relatively green and quite shady

I took her back home  where it’s safer
As long as my cat wouldn’t bite her
When she saw my mascara
It seems that it scared her
It is red but it failed to excite her.

We agreed that we hated dark grey
And the shades of it caused us dismay
So we watched Leonard Cohen
My love is still growing
But he’s dead and so he cannot play.

Humorous look at procrastination

DryS_Peacock

Photo by Mike Flemming 2017 copyright

Wait a Minute while I Procrastinate

Extract

“Gone Are the Days …

We live in such a distracting world these days. Too much information running through our brains (so goes one of my favorite Police songs). Gone are those halcyon days of rocking on the front porch, sipping lemonade, the big event of the day being the mail delivery. The phone was in the house, so if it rang, you didn’t really have to get up and answer it. Not like today, with our cell phones like an appendage we can’t live without. How did we get here? Did you ever imagine one day you would go into apoplexy if you weren’t “connected” to your tribe for more than a few minutes?

We’ve allowed distraction to be part of our lives. Few people have the discipline or the desire to discipline themselves to focus and concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. Sure, some of us have jobs where we have to focus or we’ll get fired. But during our personal time, off the clock and away from watching eyes, we let go of the reins. We allow media and life to pull our attention in a myriad of directions. Sometimes we feel like a kid at a carnival, with all those bright, shiny, noisy, exciting things clamoring for our attention.”

I played outside and now I feel quite dire

Confused by sun, which shone like a red fire,
I  dressed for summer, made myself a meal
I sat outside and now I feel quite dire.

My husband  was  a gentleman and liar
He told me  he was warmer than  hot steel;
We sinned, seduced by sun, which raged like fire.

My mind’s made up; his ashes are for hire.
I need the cash to  get this cold to heal
I  ate outside and now I feel quite dire.

My eyes are red and no-one them admires.
I miss the cat, shall I adopt a seal?
Bemused by men, whose eyes watch me on fire,

I loved online and it was but satire.
He spun my mind and then he spun the wheel.
I loved outside and now I feel right queer.

My mind and heart are broken and concealed
No man will  see my body on newsreels
Made mad by men who claimed to be on fire,
I lay outside and now I feel desired.

Attention in the moment, that is grace

Attention in the moment gives us grace
To lose our self in seeing brings us peace.
We see the most when we are most effaced

Life is  a strong tapestry of lace
The little threads connect and never cease
Attention  to each  moment  brings us grace

A friend who never doubts, we can’t embrace.
They make  themselves more boring than a beast
We hear the most when we are most effaced

A friend who’s open gives our hearts solace.
With these, we share the wine, enjoy a feast
Attention  to each  moment  brings us grace

We will  meet our  lovers as we play;
Who notices the details, most and least.
We feel the most when we are most effaced

In our soul, we feel the spring release.
Guarded by attention, not police.
Attention in the moment, that is grace
We see the most when we are most effaced

 

 

 

What makes bad writing bad?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/20/what-makes-bad-writing-bad-toby-littIMG_0024

“Bad writers often believe they have very little left to learn, and that it is the literary world’s fault that they have not yet been recognised, published, lauded and laurelled. It is a very destructive thing to believe that you are very close to being a good writer, and that all you need to do is keep going as you are rather than completely reinvent what you are doing. Bad writers think: “I want to write this.” Good writers think: “This is being written.”

To go from being a competent writer to being a great writer, I think you have to risk being – or risk being seen as – a bad writer. Competence is deadly because it prevents the writer risking the humiliation that they will need to risk before they pass beyond competence. To write competently is to do a few magic tricks for friends and family; to write well is to run away to join the circus.

Your friends and family will love your tricks, because they love you. But try busking those tricks on the street. Try busking them alongside a magician who has been doing it for 10 years, earning their living. When they are watching a magician, people don’t want to say, “Well done.” They want to say, “Wow.”

At worst, on a creative writing course, the tutor will be able to show you how to do some magic tricks; at best, they will teach you how to be a good magician; beyond that, though, is doing magic – and that you will have to learn for yourself. For what a tutor can’t show you is how to do things you shouldn’t be able to do.”

Perhaps it was King David

Cats on the hill

Mary had been reading a new book called,” The Path” by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh.To her surprise, she saw it reviewed on her phone where she read the guardian news.She had decided to get out of bed on the other side just to start.
When she awoke the next day, she remembered her vow.Unfortunately, she forgot she was inside a fleece sleeping bag with a zip on one side only.Should she get some scissors and cut her way out on the other side?Or  was that a foolish  idea since nobody but she would know she had failed her to keep her first new promise.
She heard a noise and them her friend Annie came in wearing a long satin nightgown and a  green velvet trench coat.
How do you like this, she asked Mary?
Mary was very red yet silent
What is wrong, with you Mary?
I need to pee but I can’t get out of bed on the wrong side.
You have no choice, said Annie.You must not wet the bed or die from a burst bladder.
But I feel a failure on my first day.
Maybe that is your lesson.Accept you can’t  do it and get on with your day.
Mary ran to the bathroom.What a relief passing water can be to poor ladies who suffer afflictions in these regions.
Annie went down to the bijou yet complex kitchen and began to make some toast and boil some eggs.She gazed at the peach walls and melon cupboard doors unable to decide if she liked them.Maybe kingfisher blue might have been better.Too late now.Mary could not afford a new kitchen even if this one was really old.At least it was not orange as was common in the 70’s.
Mary came in with her golden hair standing up on end like candlesticks from the Synagogue.
I just got a shock,  she said
I can see your hair is standing on end.Was it the electric socket?
No, there was a man looking into the window and I was naked in the bath.
Perhaps it was King David, Annie joked.Why don’t you have frosted glass?
Stan said it would frost itself in the winter.He was the least practical man in the world.
Maybe we could glue artificial frost onto it?
Who was the man, asked Annie her cheeks pinker than her perky pink lipstick by  Licumb ; those lips which were  so thick and sensual with a lovely curve.
Mary tore her eyes away from these lips.I didn’t have my glasses on, she said.Maybe it was a man from a hot air balloon?
Maybe someone fancies you at last,saidAnnie.
Do you think I’d  go out with a man who does things like that?
No, you could stay in with him, Annie joked, as tears of mirth made her green eyeshadow and red mascara stream down her cheeks like rain after a nuclear explosion.No wonder men ran after her in the street.
You could succumb to his charms,Annie whispered.
I think I’d like a man more sensitive than that, Mary screeched.
Well, Mary, you are so lacking in knowledge the art of flirting you only notice men when they do something really wild or unusual
Like what, asked Emile who had just munched up a bowl of dried cat food and was full of energy.
Well, Stan kept pretending he loved reading Newton’s original writings which he bought from some unusual website thinking it would impress Mary. However as he failed O leve; maths 5 times he could not understand it.He sobbed and cried in the public library and Mary was moved by his grief.Later on, though, he became  angry at her intellectual talent and took me as his mistress to get back at her.She never even noticed!
I don’t see how having a mistress is a revenge  on  poor woman who was given her genes by God, said Emile.
Don’t be daft, she buys her  jeans from TK Maxx, Annie answered.
And so do all of us.

I can’t write any more right now!

It’s a full emptiness

Held in your arms
I gaze into your face
See the present and the past
layered in there,
Your face is many faces;
all the selves  that you have been
You are my sweet onion
I can peel back in my imagination
each layer of your being
rejoicing in each one.
You show me these faces all together
And I love each face, each facet of you.
Inside is the sacred,
The private place
where no-one but God
is present.
It is not nothing like inside the onion.
It’s a full emptiness
A space of music, of verse.
There you receive
intimations of truth and joy.
And I know this because
in that place we are all connected;
we are all one in the place
both private and entirely whole.
Shall I say holy?
I have a book
Holiness is wholeness.
But it’s not that I am whole
We are all whole and a unity
Communicating through deep feeling.
The noise of today cuts us off
from our depths
and so from each other.
Out alone in the high mountains
we are closer than in a busy Mall.
Distance is not a concern here,
Time travel really happens.
You are nearer to me when I am alone…
Until I see your sweet lined face
Shaped by concerns into a beauty not genetic
but formed by your feeling life
When I see you it’s like the first time
when I both knew you and didn’t know you at all.
That’s the enchantment of our being,
And of nature and love.
The winter is here
Yet then your shape is clearer
and your path towards me dearer.
I look into your eyes
Green and blue.
We live in love, the ocean;
We swim like fish turning;
fish joyful
in the deep dark sacred places
where few may venture except in dreams.
You are my own dear onion.
My multi-layered man.
Your eyes shine with a light
I never saw before.
Like the holy candle burning in the dark night
I love that sight.

Boundaries of the inner and the outer

Standing together,
We lean forward touching foreheads lightly
Eyes closed for a moment
Tenderly we respect
The other’s boundaries.
Yet I feel your heart beating too,
As it it were me.
We lean for a few more moments like this.
Wordless.
Holding the broken places, with love.
Then we turn and walk away
Such moments last forever
In the eternity that Love creates
Foreheads touching,
Skin to skin.
Boundaries of the inner and the outer
You are another
A real human person
Wanting nothing; wanting everything
I  remember your smile.
You were with me once
And now we go our ways
Our own difficult journeys.

One meeting of souls
Creates its own symbol

May you be blessed
May the fire not burn you
Nor the water drown you
May the Lord keep you always near him.
May He protect your spirit.
May he give you strength always.

The Nightmare Complex

To write a poem I dream an undreamed dream
The woods in France  where float the dead young men
A nightmare complex in its perplexed themes

In our dream the narrative has means
To  make those killed communicate again
To write a poem I dream an undreamed dream

Later, in another war, trains  steamed
To take the insect Jew, no longer man.
A nightmare complex in its evil themes

The little pearls we half see  as we scheme;
The evasions we ignored but which remained.
We read a poem,  we dream an undreamed dream

Who we are and who we might have been
At 4 am  in isolated pain
The Nightmare Complex,  come to share our screams

Can any see the woods as Dante aimed
To recreate the paths where we might change?
To write a poem embodies  soldiers’  dreams
Nightmares dark  with piercing warlike themes

For someone non-existent, God has power

For someone non-existent  God has power
To wreck the world he learns from every  hour.
He is not here or there or where at all
And yet we do have evidence of Fall.

Why  must men be angry as they boast,
They can prove there is no Holy Ghost?
No benediction, blessing, nothing good
No meaning, nothing sacred, never Love.

For who is zero,  who’s in the empty set?
God  seems ever harder to forget
Men argue with red cheeks and suffer strokes
While God sits back, enjoys an evening smoke.

While Nothing shall remain and  nausea  sighs
Let’s enjoy the  madness and the lies.

 

A hundred years and still the forests bleed

We, human, learned the power of words and signs
For economics, fighting and parlay.
We loved, in abstract, symbols strange, malign.

There is wrought beauty, patterned in design
Yet to see the  actual one is how we pray
Which humans saw the power of disguised signs?

We like  the half familiar,  the foreign
For we were nomads once and  we’re unnamed.
The move towards abstraction , why malign?

We love each unique person unconfined.
We cannot love “mankind” although God may.
We, human, feel the power of words and signs

The  tree has roots and God is unresigned
So  begins the knowledge in his clay
The abstract tree bears fruits rich and malign.

When God smiled, she said the seventh day.
Is  one on which each little child should play
Despite  that humans saw the  power of sign
And cultivated woods for wars malign.

Submit to numbers like numb masochists

Humans with creative spirit blessed
Mothers with their  cherished babies smile
Yet submit to numbers like known masochists

Culture changes, takes alarming twists.
We lose our voices  no more to beguile.
We’re human, we’re creative spirit fleshed

The snake in Eden laughs; he sees the gist.
Before we know the culture, we’re entwined.
We submit to numbers like dim masochists

We do not know, and so cannot confess.
Here comes down the reckoning, we hide.
We humans with creative spirit cursed!

We counted sheep and goats but not  the lost
Now it’s missiles, warheads, thunderous rides
We submit to numbers, shady masochists

 

The government has numbered all the hosts.
Archangels slumber   round the Holy  Ghost
Humans with creative spirit cast
Into the holy waters; are we lost?

Oh,where are we to kiss?

KODAK Digital Still Camera

 

My love is like a mirror, that’s covered in thick dust.
Oh, alright you can kiss me,  but will you dust me first?
You lost the yellow duster!
My mind is filled with wrath.
How can you reflect me now?
I’ll take a virgin’s oath.

My love is like a bedspread that’s never had a wash.
We like to be entwined in it and share a pipe of hash.
You never bought the grass?
What brought us to this pass?
We’ll have to wash this duvet first,
Then go out and get smashed.

My love is like jacket, which dropped off a large spud.
It’s still quite warm and tasty, but will it be much good?
You want to ask advice?
I’m  not sure that is not wise
Creep quick inside my pocket now
And soon we’ll go to bed.
My love is like a camera film, that’s never been exposed.
I want save the battery until I find a rose.
But it’s not summer yet!
My Lord,did I forget?
It was sitting in this warm armchair,
Reciting all my woes.

My love sent me a message, that he was nearly home.
So I ran a bath, jumped into it and covered myself in foam.
His key is in the door.
It’s only half-past four!
I took my mobile off the chair
And rang for tea and scones.

My love was very angry as I never made the bed.
He bought me wood and iron but it went out of my head.
Oh,where are we to kiss?
Oh,where’s our night of bliss?
He looked so  disappointed
I got my bag and fled.