I have  filled my mind   with  dreams   and thoughts
I have drawn conclusions  that seem real.
What’s of  value’s not by effort bought.

As Ted Hughes said,his fishing was the sport
Which brought both meditation and a meal.
I have   studied minds   and  dreams   and thoughts

We see ,like that,new images are caught.
In silence and in noticing  the feel.
What’s of  value’s not by effort bought.

What we find may not be what we sought.
At  first ,it may not show its wise appeal
I have  found  my mind through  dreams and thoughts

In the night the images  take flight.
God’s lioness  destroys what  is  congealed
What’s of  value’s not by effort wrought.

Like a butterfly, a flowering dart
Of love and beauty  which was once concealed,
I have  found my mind  by  dreams, my  wordless thoughts.
What’s of  value’s not by effort bought.

Can’t afford a vibrator?Get a nervous tic or tremor free on the NHS
Gone off sex?Try love instead
Impotent? You have diabetes.
Too lustful.Go ape.
Too shy? Become a creative genius like Newton.
Too selfish? Believe them.
Can’t afford birth control? Learn how to breastfeed in public.That  works as lomg as you never go to bed.

Writing may reveal  our thoughts to us  but it is debatable whether that is a good thing

Lancashire coastal space

Between the world and how we represent
The nameless by a name and  even  place
There is a space or void in our intent.

What mother saw, what father really meant
How love and hate might intertwine in space?
In our own world, what can we represent?

In writing, there is lack and letters bent
For  ancient writing often  scholars traced
There is a space or void in our intent.

Today the sun is golden,  gods descend.
With love, for moments, we are all embraced
Of  the felt, what can we represent?

Our willingness unblinds the heart so rent
And then we see the face within his face
The space or void is in our   own intent

I cross my eyes with fingers interlaced:
The crucifix, the love, the death of Christ
Between the world and what we may attempt
There is a space or void where he was sent.

 

When of the world of doctors,I am sick.
When diagnosis is not any aid
When from the choices given, I cannot pick
Although I feel my deepest debts were paid.

The paradox  with which Russell  made play,
Is a trick of language ,not the world
For in Jerusalem, the men don’t shave
And as we know, each spectrum has its wave.

The barber was a Jew  quite orthodox
And to his salon, all the rich men flocked
He trimmed his  beard   with my old pinking shears
So he would have waves around his ears.

As  over-educated men made argument
He listened to them with his ear well bent.
But told them not that they were silly fools
For on this earth, the madmen make the rules.

A paradox, a wonder that we love.
When men so cruel will thrash the holy dove.

I  got a card declaring  love entire
For now and for the future, fiction yet.
As long as   I’d accept he was a liar

My heart was touched and so was my desire
I stepped into his outstretched fishing net
I had card declaring love entire.

Oh, how we burned in love’s delicious fire.
On marriage then my heart became quite set
As long as   I’d accept he was a liar

We made love in the fields and in the byre
My peachy face by kisses was beset
He sent a  card declaring love entire.

His car had wheels but never knew a  tyre.
For quicksands  are too soft to navigate
I did accept but wished he’d leave these mires

If he said he loved, he loved me not
If he  burned with hate, his love was hot
I  got a card admitting he’d been wired.
I tapped him and enjoyed his well played lyre.

New hairstyle 2017 

I notice Trump did not hold Merkel’s hand.
Despite that they both come from the same land.
Their ancestors were neighbours
And shared their load of labour
But now Drumpf seems to be another hbrand

Their chairs were set quite far apart, I saw.
Did she ask for that or was it he?
Or one of his advisors
Who did a silent favour?
By walling off their private territory?

I wonder such men find women equals?
Usually, women are   to them a sequel
Two days   of argument
And lots of money spent.
I bet seeing Merkel was a prequel.

Theresa May seems to have no valid weight
She may attempt to set all Europe straight
But Trump broke her defences
She needs a wall, not mere fences.
If she gambles, she will face sure defeat

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/92637

 

“Effort at Speech Between Two People”
Rukeyser was only 21 when she won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets prize for her first book, Theories of Flight, but this poem from that collection demonstrates just how fully formed her poetic vision already was. For Rukeyser, poetry really is speech between people—even her most abstracted, experimental work genuinely attempts to connect readers and writer, to employ verse not only as a means of expression and transformation but also of listening. At once intimate and anthemic, urgent and quiet, this poem repeatedly asks “what are you now,” inviting us to find ourself

 

 

“Käthe Kollwitz”
Rukeyser was a master portraitist, capturing figures ranging from the composer Charles Ives to Jewish sage Akiba over the course of her career. This poem from the “Lives” section of The Speed of Darkness pays homage to another portraitist, Käthe Kollwitz, whose paintings and prints depicted “the faces of the sufferers / in the street, in dailiness.” Its five sections are often ekphrastic, drawing on the German artist’s expressionist images of weavers. But Rukeyser was also interested in the artist herself, whose frank ideas about artistic process, sexual desire, and gender fluidity mirrored Rukeyser’s own.

 

http://www.holistichelp.net/dysautonomia-autonomic-nervous-system-dysfunction.html

 

Get Lots of Rest

Unfortunately in our society we tend to frown upon people who rest and take naps. We are expected to be doing something all the time, and if we aren’t then we are often labeled as lazy or lacking in motivation. This attitude contributes greatly to autonomic nervous system conditions, because basically the norm in our society is to run yourself into the ground. Taking time to rest and nap is very healthy and getting plenty of it is a crucial part of recovery for an overactive sympathetic nervous system. This includes insuring that you get your 8 or 9 hours of sleep each night. The adrenal glands, as well as the body in general, does its regeneration while we sleep.

Cholesterol Level

Dr. Charles Gant tells us that a cholesterol level of below 160 is very hazardous to your health. Cholesterol is needed for the synthesis of all our steroid hormones. If you don’t have enough cholesterol, you can’t produce your life sustaining hormones like dhea, progesterone, estrogen, aldosterone and testosterone and most importantly in regard to the autonomic nervous system, cortisol. Cholesterol is converted to pregnenalone, which is converted to progesterone, which is converted to cortisol. If your cholesterol levels are too low, then they need to be increased.

 

 

 

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2692/w-s-merwin-the-art-of-poetry-no-38-w-s-merwin

 

INTERVIEWER

Is it some profound connection to the natural world?

MERWIN

The connection is there—our blood is connected with the sea. It’s the recognition of that connection. It’s the sense that we are absolutely, intimately connected with every living thing. We don’t have to be sentimental and pious about it, but we can’t turn our backs on that fact and survive. When we destroy the so-called natural world around us we’re simply destroying ourselves. And I think it’s irreversible.

INTERVIEWER

Do you see a connection between poetry and prayer?

MERWIN

I guess the simple answer is yes, if only because I think of poetry as an attempt to use language as completely as possible. And if you want to do that, obviously you’re not concerned with language as decoration, or language as amusement, although you certainly want language to be pleasurable. Pleasure is part of the completeness. I think of poetry as having to do with the completeness of life, and the completeness of relation with one’s experience, completing one’s experience, articulating it, making sense of it.

INTERVIEWER

How about the influence of Zen in your work?

MERWIN

When you talk about prayer in Judeo-Christian terms, prayer is usually construed as a kind of dualistic act. You’re praying to somebody else for something. Prayer in the Western sense is usually construed as making a connection. I don’t think that connection has to be made; it’s already there. Poetry probably has to do with the recognizing of that connection, rather than trying to create something that isn’t there.

My mother was so tactful.She introduced my husband to her neighbours:
This is my sin-in-law.

 

Before we change ourselves we must perceive
An evening list of all our self-made scars.
For without seeing we may be deceived.

Do you think that self-attack does good?
Do you believe in such uncivil war?
Perhaps you’ll drown yourself in homemade mud.

Inevitably  we   suffer outer pains
But adding to  them shows how weak we are.
Be stronger and  so try to  be humane

Compare it with the use of a smartphone.
We don’t know how tethered we now are.
Until a special app used makes it known.

Though  joy and love  are not produced by will
There are doors which we should keep well barred
We can limit  self-hate and its bill

Now spirit and its guidance is long gone;
We roam quite blindly where the door’s ajar.
Yet potential wholeness  is here  for  everyone

The diary we keep of self-attack.
Gives new perception; shows  who we  now are
Enlightens us  and guides us through the lack

The  journey may be long and pain occurs
There is a crack   through which new light enters
For change  to  happen we  must see, perceive
Then change  comes, hby natural  grace we’re eased.

Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire;
    he breaks out against all sound judgment.
 A fool takes no pleasure in understanding,
    but only in expressing his opinion.
 When wickedness comes, contempt comes also,
    and with dishonour comes disgrace.
 The words of a man’s mouth are deep waters;
    the fountain of wisdom is a bubbling brook.
 It is not good to be partial to^[a] the wicked
    or to deprive the righteous of justice.
A fool’s lips walk into a fight,
    and his mouth invites a beating.
 A fool’s mouth is his ruin,
    and his lips are a snare to his soul.
⁸The words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels;
    they go down into the inner parts of the body.
 A rich man’s wealth is his strong city,
    and like a high wall in his imagination.
 Before destruction a man’s heart is haughty,
    but humility comes before honour.

 

‘Man’s inhumanity to man is equaled only by man’s inhumanity to himself.” Anon

Scruples make us focus more and more
We focus more and more on less and less.
We fall into the black dot we have bored.

Excessive zeal is narcissism galore,
As off to that Confessional we rush,
Scruples make us focus more and more

How can we love our sisters when  unsure
Our  guts and bladders squelch in horrid mush
We fall into the blackness off the shore.

Oh, sacred Self, oh Sanctity renewed!
God will worship me, delicious!
Scruples made me narrow-eyed and sure.

By my own will, I thought I could be pure.
A mystic soul  admired by all the toffs
I fell into the black hole of manure.

The sensitive  of mind  find life so rough
That  penance, torture, whipping’s not enough
Scruples made my focus narrow down.
I fell down the black hole , hey, what a clown!

Schubr

If you see things t other people don’t,
Like   eyes  afloat and  fish  flying  quite bare
Better keep it to yourself, I say
For being odd can lead us to despair

If you see blood dripping down the walls
And Jesus getting off his Cross in church
Get your eyes  glued to the book of prayer
Even if your guts begin to lurch.

If God burns  bold in bushes near your State
Direct him with your Sat Nav to the Gate.
Never call him Father, Mother, Mate
Just tell him you are busy  and you’re late

If us women wish no more to mate
Nor bear children, nor  elucidate;
Is there something evil in control
That boils our ova and cremates our  souls?

And if the men are  unemployed and  feeling low
Wish not to marry nor to share their woe
Well, once we had the coal mines deep and dark
And if they saw a golden light they sparked

I won’t tell you of my secrets as it’s night.
But keep a candle  and a wit to bite

http://hudsonreview.com/2013/02/dying-to-write-poetry-2/

 

“When one has grown tired of one’s contemporaries, how satisfying it is to sit back and get whacked by the great dead, to be reminded of original impulses or models far from one’s own experience. I have for years now been grateful for the poetry of Dick Davis, an Englishman who teaches medieval Persian literature at OhioStateUniversity, and for his extraordinary translations, which perform for Persian poetry what Wilbur has done for French. The sheer breadth of Davis’ publications in the field, the number of major works he has brought into English, including The Conference of the Birds, The Shahnameh, Vis and Ramin and others, strikes me as one of the true literary achievements of our time. Davis’ rhyming lines flow like a river, never impeding narrative, never becoming cumbersome in any way. His new volume brings three poets of fourteenth-century Shiraz into English: Hafez (the only poet in this group familiar to me), Jahan Malek Khatun and Obayd-e Zakani.⁵ The third of these figures was a rascal:”

I drink my coffee from a  mug my brother sent to me
I like to keep  two separate ones for coffee and for tea
This  one was expensive and it looks just like the sea
I think of Saltburn and the shore while I  drink coffee.

From Teesmouth and Redcar we walked in loving times
The long beach was quite empty, Saltburn pier’s divine.
I kept a little journal where I spelt it out in  rhyme
I may come from Manchester but these sands are very fine.

We went to Whitby and Sandsend and  loved it all  the more
My husband liked the pork pie shop and he ate 24.
He didn’t eat them all at once, a fact I do deplore.
For pork pies are sustaining when you walk miles on the shore.

His daddy liked the heather best, his mammy liked the sea.
And she was much the stronger one, it was evident to me.
So if you got to Roseberry and  that Topping  great
Remember his old daddy and   all his working mates

They spent their lives in ICI breathing in foul air
But they earned a living and so they all stayed there.
My husband was asthmatic and they took him out of  town
He spent 3 months up in the Moors , his mammy turned dark brown.

She must have been of mixed up race, an ethnic half-caste pearl
She was always called as white when she was  just a girl.
But when she spent 12 weeks outdoors  then the people saw
Black and white are not quite right to describe our skins-in-law.

 

Null und Eins: Aphorisms

Quote:

KIRILLOV’S MIRACLE.— In Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed, Kirillov isn’t entirely mistaken about the outcome of his suicide. When he kills himself, he will indeed kill God, as he believes. Suicide violates the most fundamental of Christian moral principles precisely because it permanently disrupts the very stability of identity God’s existence is supposed to guarantee. In killing himself, Kirillov does not kill God, he becomes God, that is, something that does not exist. Thinking is a war against death; reality is the battleground. The Divine was invented by the primitive imagination as a weapon against death, but when this fact is forgotten, the weapon is turned back against its inventor. When the Death of God is finally announced, those who have killed him do not realize that something will inevitably take His place. Nor do they suspect the obvious usurper: Nature: that which remains when the superfluous hypothesis disappears. Rather than vanishing along with God, the problem of suicide actually intensifies. It goes from being a mortal sin to an unnatural act. Thus, in order for Kirillov to be truly successful, he would have to perform a miracle: he would have to kill himself twice.

 

THE ART OF JUGGLING CORPSES.— Power concerns the organization, arrangement, and distribution of material objects in physical space. Whatever ideas and ideals are brought to bear on this process are necessarily corrupted and weighed down by their contact with decaying matter. Politics, in other words, is the art of juggling corpses and anyone whose highest value is power stinks of the grave.

Through the TV series fun on Saturdays,
They educate us to our foreign ways
We’re blind to our own prejudice, you see.
But we can see it on our dramatised TV.

 

Our mind’s a stranger to our self;
As Freud discovered with his stealth
We make believe we are all saints.
In words, by gum, it doesn’t half sound quaint!

Tonight on Taggart we see Poles
Shot at close range, here, look , bullet holes.
They’re foreign though they were born here.
And, by the way, your auntie’s queer.

We want a game like chess  with rules
Make it black and white, we’re fools.
We forget the Last Judgment’s here today
And God is foreign, by the way.

God’s the foreigner par excellence
He sent us Son down here just once
But like we often do , we killed
They’re using TV   now to change our wills.

Enlighten us, dear God, by screens  of blue
Make us understand we’re foreign too
We don’t  need to go to Church
The TV’s on and here I perch

 

 

Oh, aspirin  found in willow bark
Before the advent of drug sharks
You are still cheap and ease  our pain
So we can get to work again
We work on  these conveyer   belts
Tearing the  guts of chickens out.
It’s   our vocation, so they say
As they  give us our mean pay
Mine is so low I can’t  pay rent
So for some Benefits I am sent
The lady thought I was a Czech
And so I would not answer back
But I am from the Isle of Wight
The trouble is, I’m not too bright.
But when you buy your chicken curry
Think of how  our fingers hurry
Tearing out those  intestines
Faster than a bird can scream
For the chickens were not dead.
Till Henry Tudor went to bed.
He penetrated their insides
Cut off their heads and made them wives.
For with no heads, they need no crowns
And he cannot see their frowns.
He got tired and wanted new
Advertised in Waterloo.
So my boss bought all he had
On the whole, they don’t taste bad.

My mother was ever so nice
She fed us on bacon and lice
I had paranoia,
I used to annoy her
By asking for sweet, sugared mice.

My mother was  never insane
Though she did vow to vote for  Remain
I have kind delusions
And utter confusion
I’ve got paranoia again.

My father was ever so wild
He got my dear mother with child
I had crazy notions
About that commotion
Sex is not good without guile.

I am  in need of some people to love
But I am a borderline, guv.
If I fall into a spiral
Of paranoid denial
Just ignore the old man above.

Everyone hears  voices speak,
They say, President Trump is a freak.
It takes one to know one;
My madness will show them
We need to be ruled by the geeks

Not a book by Mike Flemmimg 2017

Bibliochasm…………. am empty space in the bookshelves.
Bibliofathom…………… to understand a book after a long period of study.
Bibliospasm….  a shudder in the bookcase.
Bibliogasm.. great pleasure from  reading a book
Bibliophone… a phone that reads the Bible   daily
Bibliosoap….. a feeble or romantic book
Bibliochoke…. when you read to quickly and can’t swallow it.
Bibliodome…… a tower of books.
Bibliograve….. a long but terminal relationship with books.

The problem with obsession is it works.
The algebra, the laptop, the smartphone.
We get things done; we never ever shirk.

We are not those folk who lightly flirt.
We gnaw the problem till we find the bones
The problem with obsession is, it works!

But we if we do a wrong, we can’t forget
We huddle in  grey armchairs  while we groan
We feel deep scruples; can’t escape or shirk.

Our nature makes stuff easy to regret.
We look back at  our “careless” ways and   groan
The problem with obsession is, it hurts.

We tense our minds and bodies  in the murk
We  lash ourselves  with  blame that’s  overgrown
We get the jobs done; even pleasure’s work!

Remember that this life is just on loan
And like the boiling kettle steam, we’ll go.
The problem with obsession is, it works.
We get it done but what’s  that really worth?

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/randy-susan-meyers/digging-hurts-the-trauma-_b_795111.html

Quote:

 

While writing my novel, I accessed dark emotional truths. I took real events (my father trying to kill my mother) and then punted the reality into a far more dramatic story. Fiction. However, what I denied (until forced by writing the Mail article to go deeper into my own family background) was the cost of doing business. Truthiness makes for a deeper more satisfying read. Truthiness often has little (and sometimes nothing) to do with whether one is portraying actual events from one’s past. Sometimes using biographical material adds up to little more than reporting. But when one accesses the emotional truth, the ugly parts of the self that trauma can reveal, that’s a gift to the reader — but it’s often ripped from the writer in a way they don’t immediately recognize.

Writing my book meant digging deep into family secrets and crypts. Family facts weren’t really revealed so much as a family culture was uncovered and combed through. After the book was published, after I raised my head from the comforting minutia of plot and structure and query letters and editorial letters, at some point I realized something: I wasn’t telling fairy tales. I’d ripped away a scrim of denial that I’d spent years perfecting, a scrim made up of food and books and television and all the myriad ways we keep ourselves at a distance from ourselves.

Doctor, writer, friend, Kathy Crowley, talking about a study done by her colleague, Dr. Jane Liebschutz, recently told me that “one of the big things that gets missed is how victims of violence or trauma unconsciously narrow their lives — they do almost nothing, maybe sit and watch TV most of the time, lead these incredibly dull existences, and how this is, in her mind, a protective response to the trauma.” (Please, Kath — do a post on this!)