Month: March 2017

For the magnetic attraction of rain.

I dreamed I rowed in a large pea green boat
Accompanied by seventeen cats.
And across the Great Lake,without a mistake
I saw mountains of gentlemen’s hats.

I was making no waves in my effort to move,
The cats were discoursing on geometry.
I looked in the mirror fixed onto my boat,
The moon showed entrancing Theology.

“I wonder who’ll help me”I thought to myself,
When I saw an entire spectrum of men–
Dirac, Archimedes,Niels Bohr, with their theories.
I got my great inspiration just then.

I need seventeen physicists,that’s one for each cat,
All tied to my boat with a chain.
The force they exert will just compensate
For the magnetic attraction of rain.

Paul Dirac came up, and I looked into his eyes,
They were full of anxiety and pain.
“I am sorry I am unable do what you wish,
But my father never taught me to swim.”

“That is perfectly alright”,I politely replied,
“You can walk on the water instead”
So that’s how my boat and its cargo of cats
Were accompanied back to my bed.

When I awoke the next day,I was filled with dismay.
I saw that Paul Dirac was gone,
With the cats and the boat,of which I just wrote
And I was now completely alone.

I took a quick look,in my old physics book
And there was a photo of Dirac
I stared at his eyes,and I am not telling lies,
He threw me a very strange look.

I caught this strange look,it’s here in my book.
I am saving it for a special event.
When I gather more Data on Relative Quanta,
I’ll understand just what Dirac meant.

When love is nothing but a word

 

When love is nothing but a word,
When our deep feelings can’t be shared.
When joy and woe unwoven lie
When we can’t speak, except to sigh………

When we are lost behind the glass,
When burdened feelings never pass,
When no-one is a trusted friend
When we are scared but cannot bend.

When love embodied goes away
When we are numbed but cannot say.
When we are rigid with the strain.
When life has little but such pain

We suffer as our will has gone
And we’ve no task to lure us on.
We need to know we’re not alone
That love can penetrate a stone.

That, like the Christ, we rise to life
When we endure with will its strife.
When we accept that all is lost,
But wish to live despite the cost.

Then we are saved as are the flowers
Which decorate the fields and bowers
Though all shall crumble into dust,
While we’re alive we’ll slake our lust.

Ghosts

As we cross the ghost filled plains of  ancient wars
Which cover most of Europe with their scars.
How can I compare  my losing one I love
When screaming poppies  haunt  below , above?
The Jews reciting Kaddish   made to walk
To death chambers where  only Evil  talked
When gypsies ,gays and  women big with child
Died grotesquely  in a  Europe big on style

And in these cells the memory ever lasts

Can anaemia arrive by loss and grief
The red blood cells are flat in disbelief
Too large to penetrate the body cells
No oxygen to feed the brain that tells.

The macro-sized red blood cells well with grief
They cannot weep nor obtain true relief
They knock out other cells as they go past
And in  these cells the memory ever lasts

The doctor at the clinic gives out pills
Folic acid with  gripe water swilled
Cortisone to heal the raw red flesh
But in the mind, the memories burn and  flash

Every cell desires to live and do its task
Can they be deceived by any mask?

 

 

I don’t feel a void inside myself

I don’t feel a void inside myself
Despite the loss of my companion
While he was alive he gave me wealth

Is  a marriage  needed for our health?
They go but their soul is never done
I don’t feel a void inside myself

Widowed,lonely ,crippled and bereft
My confidence has never been full on
While he was alive he gave me wealth

Half blind, yet I see by my own stealth
One can live with  confidence  or none
I don’t feel a void inside myself

Sometimes now I feel I have no self
But God has got me in his winged span
My lover was alive and gave me wealth

 

Dear Lord, I do feel lonesome just for him
I washed his feet and poured the oil  there on
I don’t feel a void but give me help
So  I can decipher all the wealth

 

 

Define your terms:poetry as therapy

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Is Poetry Therapeutic? Define Your Terms!

 

“Certainly readers should refrain from pop-culture-informed psychoanalysis of poets based upon a poem, or even on a collection of poems. The poet may be playing, taking on a persona, hiding behind a mask, recounting historical narrative. It is also true that writing a really excellent poem takes considerable effort far beyond whatever initial expressive urge prompted the piece. And many terrific poems emerge from almost arbitrary prompting rather than from some inner need to rant, emote, reveal the ego, or unpack a trauma. Poets don’t write themselves into sanity. They may confront the void, articulate fears, challenge external and internal authorities, channel grief, and tell stories; but poets who begin writing for reasons of therapeutic expression are usually people already inclined to love the rhythm, music, imagery, wordplay and magical rhetoric of language. Read interviews with poets. The proof is there.”

I thought I’d gone crazy

I’m getting penicillin tomorrow
For I’ve got a UTI bad
I thought I’d gone crazy
And dreadfully lazy
When the germs took a hold in my head.

I could not find my kindle reader
And I’ve cancelled the Guardian off line
I tried  reading the cereal box
And to sort out all my odd socks
But my head was not fiy to design

Now I must wait for the delivery
In the morning their van will come round
I cannot walk there
Although it’s not all that far
I expect after that I’ll  feel grand

We lose ourselves in shadows and may fall.

The world is exists but I just wish to flee
The flowers come into bud but I can’t see.
The birds have built their new   small nests again
Birds forget, but memory feeds our pain.

When I get trapped inside this mud black silt
I forget the tools my mind has lately  built
Again it feels eternal and unkind
The sorrowing  fills the endless realms of mind.

The mind  helps us to mediate and muse
We need it to give weight to different views
But   inwardness can  build up dangerous walls
We lose ourselves in shadow  and may fall.

The life within us will rise up again
If  we  can accept our mental pain.

My traitorous heart

Sonnets

A sonnet has three verses of four lines each which rhyme in a certain way as you can read in mine.Then the have two lines at the end which should be succinct.Shakespeare’s sonnets are the most well known and rightly so
I live a life that many would enjoy
My home and garden artists would admire
And yet my heart is sad and I feel flawed
As my real life fits not to my desire.
I married for the money that I’d gain
and for the house and garden of my dreams
Yet looking back my error is quite plain
That love cannot be found by she who schemes.
I gave birth to a six children whom I love
My sons and daughters are my living joy.
Yet I fear vengeance from the God above…
I made my husband’s life into my toy.
And yet he seems so happy with his lot
Perhaps my traitorous heart has been forgot
 

A bitter sorrow used becomes a curse

 When true love’s gone and doom hangs over head
When life runs like a river to the sea
Then shall I take new lovers to my bed.
And with their carnal touch consoled be?
When true loves lie and break my woman’s heart.
When life seems grey and rocks bestrew my path.
Then, shall I my life of evil start
And on the world shall I bestow my wrath?
When true loves lie and wreck all loyalty.
When puzzlement makes all the world seem mad.
Then I shall upend causality
And let myself do deeds which make all glad.
Our lust for vengeance makes our own lives worse.
A bitter sorrow used becomes a curse

The mind of poetry

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Image by Mike Flemming.Copyright

Inside the Mind of Poetry

“The greatest lines in poetry are infinitely quotable while having no definite meaning. What is a mind of winter, and why must one have one? It doesn’t matter. Wallace Stevens’ greatness lay in his ability to produce these kinds of anti-aphorisms, seemingly wise but ultimately ungraspable: Thought is false happiness. She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. And, most pointedly: The poem must resist the intelligence / almost successfully. (Or, nay, successfully!)

I believe that to read poetry, one must have a mind of poetry. You must enter a state where you come to understand meaning-resistant arrangements of language as having their own kind of meaning. It’s quite similar to those Magic Eye posters from the ‘90s: If you haven’t figured out how to look at them, you can’t believe that anyone really sees the dolphin. (This metaphor has its limits, making learned skill seem like an on/off conversion; too, with poetry, even when you’ve mastered “the trick,” not everyone sees the same thing.)”

No sound no sight

narcissus2017-2

In fields of lushest  buttercups we ‘d lie
We’d watch the clouds as gently they blew by.
Love was born we thought would never die.
But now you’re gone and here I sadly sigh

That love itself remains without your form
Yet tears of loss enfold me like a storm.
I knew you’d never hurt or  do me harm.
I  felt your smile’s embrace, so wide, so warm.

How is the world,now emptied of your being?
No sound,no touch,no smell,no sight,no seeing.
How is the world when you have gone ahead
Yet I must linger in my lonely bed?

Some days I weep with gladness for my friends
Some days I weep in sadness without end

When fantasy and dream become confused

When  others acts push splinters through our souls
And into strangers ears we pour our woes..
When grief and sorrow shudder through our walls.
And whether all is lost we cannot know

When what is in or out we cannot tell
Then fantasy and dream become confused.
When darts of agony are felt to maim each cell.
When sensibility is utterly bemused.

He,in whom I to trusted, willed to fail
For what he  claimed  was friendship  was desire.
Now pain and disappointment make  me frail;
In torment know this person was a liar.

Then, having lost all other means to live,
We turn to darkness where our consolation is.

I am X’s wife

I met a neighbour waiting for the bus
He asked why I’ve not remarried yet
I said men don’t like clever wives
But like a cat I have nine lives
So one day some kind man may quite forget.

He asked why I don’t move into a flat
I said I’ll join the circus acrobats
He said,why you can hardly walk
Which makes  you easier to stalk
I disappeared and he is looking yet.

I wonder why men offer me advice
But yet nobody  loves me more than twice
I think I’ll cross the gender lines
And pay a ransom or a fine
Then I’ll pick a  lady for my wife

They say 1/16  of a percent are mixed
So when they are older they must choose their sex
I’m glad we seem to have less shame
And they are in no way to blame
Otherwise they’d all be total wrecks.

I did a quizz my IQ’s 65
The most moronic algebraist alive.
As I am 9/10ths masculine
I wonder it it is a sin
To look so cute when I am  X’s wife

Maybe I am gay but just don’t know
A phallic symbol turned me to and fro
I think I need Viagra now
But my doctor’s a real cow
She said, where you go I shall also go.

So now she follows  Biblical texts too
Her name’s not Rachel,  yet she is a Jew
She desires eternal sex
And   all I want’s eternal rest
I think the Hebrew Bible’s  writers do.

 

Meta-language,language and the babble

Sometimes when we speak, although it’s words
They are at the level  of the screams of birds
Because it’s all in words don’t mean it’s language
Remember all that screaming does minds damage

Words are truly signs and symbols perfect
But what they point to   may have its own defects
The imaginary, wordless  and imperfect
The real in words resigned to own  the phallic.

Symbols are deep wells   with built in buckets
We had one but someone must have struck it
Some thought it was the call  to evening worship
While rabbits bored holes through my mother’s turnips

Meta-language,language and the babble
Let’s decide we all are more than rabble

The future’s fiction,and Ted Hughes has spun it

I ought to write a sonnet,oh goddamit.
The future’s fiction,and Ted Hughes has spun it
A sonnet quite informal for the planet
I ought to write one but I need a permit.

If I’d like to write a sonnet ,I will plan it
As Mary Queen of Scots embroidered rabbits.
The sonnet is  much too strong a habit.
Get the Book or I shall steal or grab it.

So I want  to write a minute  yet perfect sonnet
If there’s a  prize   so far I ‘ve rarely won it
Ask Dante, was  it Petrarch who just done it?
A sonnet is  a sexist name.Goddamit

You think it’s really great to write Platonic?
If you saw my form , you’d learn I’m not a cynic

 

The future’s fiction,it is not too late 2

If words  cost  money,what do you think you’d say
When we ate  our meal  late in the day?
If words cost that much money, would we dare
To spend all  that we had  to mouth  a prayer?

If words cost  money,how  good is your bank?
If we are rich I have your work to thank.
If words cost money, do write me a cheque
Before I start  to talk  or to regret.

If words cost   money, are  the wealthy rich?
Their words are  worth  less  than a needle stitch.
If words take all your money, here’s the Word
He said,give it away,but we’ve not  dared.

He is the Word   which spoken made the world
But  why have such great evils since  occurred?
Why would  G-d   who’s Love  and Logos too
Be  daily killed  as humans fight anew?

The burning bush no longer has  its flames
Jesus dies;  the angels weep in shame

I could not measure justice nor what’s fair

When I was burning with  the fire of rage
Or speaking in a voice emotion bare
I did not find escape from my small cage

When I misused the knowledge of my age
And for another did not feel much care
I was burning  bright with  fire enraged

When I  with my  own mind did not engage
I could not   measure justice nor what’s fair
I could not find escape from my small cage

But when I saw the view from off the page
At this right angle  placed, I knew  to say:
I  shall not fight a friend ,when trapped in rage

Now I thank the metaphoric trade
Which symbolises feelings’ higher ways
I found   at last the exit from my cage

Looking  with the broad view of  child’s play,
I found the path   which seems to be my way
No longer burning with  the fires of rage
I  found escape from my unholy cage

An ancient ,holy sound begins the Spring.

Although it’s dark out there the blackbird sings
His territory  is the same as in the past
An ancient ,holy sound begins the Spring.

These birds are little dinosaurs with wings
Like the spider they adapted and so last
Although it’s dark, out there my blackbird sings.

What other pleasures will the season bring?
Alas the seasons come and too soon pass
An ancient ,holy sound begins the Spring.

In my leafy wood, birds wisely throng.
We have no cat nor greenhouse with its glass
Although it’s dark, out there my blackbird sings.

In my heart, for Northern moors I long;
The heather where we loved, the sheep shorn grass
As ancient ,holy sounds began the Spring.

Yet I am never mournful for the past
God lives in each small moment,life’s our Mass
Although it’s dark out there the blackbird sings
An ancient ,holy sound begins the Spring.

Nostalgia and its problems

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/25/mohsin-hamid-danger-nostalgia-brighter-future

 

“Why are we so strongly attracted to nostalgia today? In part, I think, because the pace of change is accelerating. Despite our close relationship with technology, at this point in our evolution human beings are still animals, and animals struggle to adapt to change that occurs too rapidly. Given enough time, polar bears might migrate off the Arctic ice, evolve darker coats, find a different diet and thrive in a new, warmer climate. But if the ice on which they depend disappears in a few decades, they are likely to die. Our adaptive capacity is far greater, but we too experience change as stress. The world my grandparents grew up in would not have been that strange to their grandparents. “

The Destruction of Sennacherib

BY LORD BYRON (GEORGE GORDON)
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
   Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
   For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
   And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.
   And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.
   And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

Writing and depression

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People think writing is therapeutic but this article explains why that is not always true.And if you are professional that adds to the problems.Not many writers become rich.

 

http://www.elizabethmoon.com/writing-depression.html

“In fact, if you wanted to make a cheery person with no predisposition to depression depressed, you could stick him in front of a typewriter or computer for hours a day–feed him a typical writer’s diet–forbid him to exercise, isolate him from friends, and convince him that his personal worth depended on his “numbers.” Make him live the writer’s life, in other words, and watch him sag.”

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Love of Alfred

Oh, Alfred, my beloved, do not go
Do  not leave, but warmth to me bestow,
Lie beside me in my bed all night
Succour me when stormy dreams affright.

Oh , Alfred, 'tis your eyes  that turn me on
The green and golden light is never gone.
Affection constant,  touch and feeling shared.
I am not embarrassed when you stare.

For you , the  gallant male, have ever  seen
My naked form well lit by  Jove’s sunbeams
And if I wear a gown of winceyette
You love it ,as it’s made for paws of cat.

Alfred,we can’t marry   yet I fear.
Cats can’t read the Book of Common Prayer

From the Economist
Europe and America: Vis-à-visas
Yesterday the European Parliament voted to suspend visa-free travel temporarily for Americans visiting the EU. The reason is that America still requires certain Europeans to obtain a visa before travelling there, which violates the EU’s requirement that all its citizens be treated equally. The vote is not binding-the European Commission must decide whether to implement it. But it marks a growing chasm between once-close allies

My jokes

You know all those Coffee Shops staffed  by foreigners?
Yeah.
The Government is  going to build 7 meter high walls around them.
So America is going metric at last!

Why are we afraid of Arabs?
Because they invented Al-Gebra

Why are we afraid of God?
He gets our goat.

Why was Mary a virgin?
Tampax were not invented then

Why did God use Prophets?
I’m lost.

Why do they sell rock  at the seaside?
They can’t sell the sea.

Why is  the UK not a republic?
It’s private.

Extract from Burnt Norton T S Eliot

Small flowers

 

http://www.davidgorman.com/4Quartets/1-norton.htm

Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.