The medium grey of clouds backlit by sun
Now turns to gentle  pink and purple hues
A pleasure to my eye and its kingdom

My kitchen’s clean and all my toils are done
I gaze delighted by this epic view
The medium soft grey clouds  are lit by sun

The once long day has passed in its wisdom
I learned my  colours and I learned some new
With pleasure to my eye and its kingdom

How  to tell  the fire from  its first flame,
As now they merge into the cold night blue
The medium soft grey clouds  are now all gone

Life is both philosophy and game
Whose the rules and whose the mind , if true?
I close my eye and dream  away its shame

Who wrote the script,who gave us every clue?
To whom is payment now so overdue?
The medium grey of clouds backlit by sun
Gives  treasure for our  dreams in  their kingdom

Like another life, lived in another world
Two years is a long time
And a very short time.
Why did you call Hello in the night?
Only once, but you did not say more.
Now I have cut down a shrub and moved the wheelie bins
So I can sit behind the hedge in sunshine.
I eat my dinner later
I don’t wash up right then.
I read books I am drawn to
But I don’t understand them
Unless some elusive bit of my mind does.
I wake up at 5 am thinking it is morning
A little black cat sits on my garden chair
Won’t  come to me, not yet!
I’d like the cat to come inside in the winter
I like to stroke them while I listen to music.
Two years
Another world, another person
You’d hardly know me
I am sorry I beat you at chess.
But you beat me in dying.

ebilling@bt.com <rogercarberry@btinternet.com>

Now my garden parasols stand tall
One is red and one is kind of beige
So naturally, rain decides to fall

I also have umbrellas in the hall
To poke invaders ‘balls if I’m enraged
Thus my garden parasols stand tall

I have a garden with a real brick wall
A lavatory never yet engaged
So, fortunately, rain decides to fall

When it’s autumn, stuff begins to fall
I read a sentence, sometimes a whole page
Still, my garden parasols look tall

I shall give my poetry my all
And if it’s bad then you may take umbrage
Unnaturally, rain will never pall.

Before we married, we were quite estranged
Afterwards, we soon became deranged
Now my garden parasols  may fall
So  sullenly. the rain decides walks over all

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day

I’ve  found there are terms derived from Art than can be useful in altering our perceptions and maybe making us forget our woes and feel more at one with the world.The most common and underrated one is,

Seeing things from a different perspective.

Most people are aware that when we look at a street or a row of trees we see them as differently shaped when we look at them from different positions.But we don’t see it can be used as a metaphor

I can imagine children think they are seeing a totally different place altogether
And furthermore to young children buildings are alive.Windows are eyes, the door is a mouth.So they seem to be looking at us.
When we grow older we invest the world with less of our imagination.So a pavement cracked and marked is fascinating to a child but is ignored, not noticed as we adults rush ahead trying to get things done

I think it is worthwhile to try to regain some childish vision and see more intensively what is near us.And who.

When we are unhappy it is good to get out of our thoughts and put our eyes and ears at the service of what is not ourself.I sometimes watched ants running up tree trunks.I wondered what their life was like.I believe injured ants are carried back to the nest.Perhaps they have a group identity.
See the brave grass growing in a crack in the road.
In a way, the environment  IS ourself when we are little and we play outside the front door.For me, it is the hills of my childhood that evoke a sense of identity,  a me-ness in me.
So to be a refugee or a displaced person must be very painful in more ways than we think.
As well as literally moving about to alter our perspective, we can also change our minds by trying to imagine what the lives of other people are like.
I find literature and novels especially are good for this.Great writers know more than psychologists.

So we can develop sympathy or empathy for others by reading.Many of us know a little Shakespeare and can identify with Hamlet or Macbeth, even King Lear.These works provide furniture for the mind.
And what do iPhones provide or texting

Should we be worried that a book written in poorish prose like 50  shades of grey outsells the Bible?
The stories of love, murder, savagery, mysticism are more interesting than these feeble writings women read on their Kindles as they commute to work.
Sometimes pretending to be a lawyer and making a case out for something you personally disagree with is a way of learning to see more widely
Because that really matters to everyone and not just the troubled or isolated

I find it hard  these days to have a proper talk
A text arrives, my landline rings, what next?
Without their smartphones, many blindly sulk.

Conversation  could occur on walks
When phones were heavy and but few could text
I find it hard  these   times to have a  talk

An object of transition , made in bulk
In colours.sizes.prices it’s alleged
That without their smartphones, many people sulk.

Their lips are shuttered with a  vocal cork.
Against our humanness, they  took a pledge
I find it hard to get  friends   here to  talk

With right hand holding combined knife and fork
The left one texts and  secrets are divulged
Without their smartphones, many folk can’t walk.

I ‘m determined with  complete resolve
To  make my tongue appealingly involved
When I  meet a human , I shall talk
And if they say,you’re foreign, I’ll  run riot.

I lost you once before the end, I know.
It was a fantasy of silent love
I accepted not the wastes  of  unthawed snow

If looks can kill, they also cause a glow,
As if another sun  shines from above
I lost you just before the end, I know.

Yet, all in all, it was a worthwhile show
Despite the naked hand inside the glove
I could not master  arctic wastes in snow

Once an innocent, I was betrothed
And we  touched so flew the homeward dove
I lost you just before the end, I know.

To be known, to love and so to laugh
To wander round the hills and ever rove
I could not  last well  in the iron snow

And yet at silhouettes of hills, we gazed
And saw those fierce Rams as they  proudly grazed
I lost you  in the mind’s mountains  I know
I would not choose the  arctic wastes  the snow

If we didn’t learn to speak like animals we would not be offended or wounded by what people said.Because they wouldn’t be able to say it.We could not ruminate and worry nor have low self-esteem.We would just do what we could and sleep when we felt like it.And only have sex once a year if we were deer.More if we were rabbits.And there is no need for courting.In fact sometimes it gets a bit aggressive as in the duck family.In London, female ducks have been killed by too many male ducks fighting over them.That rather defeats the purpose of sex in the animal world.They can’t write love letters nor use sex as recreation.Still who had time for recreation these  days
After you’ve blogged, tweeted been on FB and read the Guardian it’s time for bed

Grammer don’t really exist
Language was oral at  first
The spoken  is necessity
The written, a monstrosity
As we learn  at a poetry fest.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/alan-r-shapiro

“Poet-critic J.D. McClatchy observed in a review of Shapiro’s Dead, Alive and Busy(2000), “Mr. Shapiro is a shrewd and sympathetic moralist. He never trivializes his subjects with high-minded flourishes or stylistic gimmicks.” Shapiro’s later collections address the loss of his two siblings to cancer, the aging of his parents, and the strains on a marriage. In describing the domestic details and loss portrayed in Shapiro’s Tantalus in Love (2005), poet Joshua Clover commented, “Such tightly framed tales of domesticity offer a sense of control parallel to Shapiro’s formal facility, reducing and clarifying the poem’s field of action in defense against an abysmal multiplicity of things.”

In his memoirs The Last Happy Occasion (1997), nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, and Vigil (1997), Shapiro has written about the death of his sister and the role that poetry has played in his life. Shapiro is also the author of a collection of essays on poetry, In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination: Essays, 1980–1991 (1993).”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/poetryandplaybookreviews/9020436/How-poetry-can-change-lives.html

Source: Grammar- Commonly Misused

https://youtu.be/DsGRSK9FDPY

Fashion plays with symbols unconcealed
The trench coat, Breton sweater, leather boots.
But sometimes “fantasy” is too near ” real”

We cannot play nor allow art to reveal
Unless there is a space where we can doubt
Fashion plays with symbols unconcealed

We must not  just with  demons do a deal
For we also need the angels who’re about.
Nowadays , our “fantasies” blur ” real”

The biker jacket’s modish in appeal.
The leather  has its Fascistic  clout
Fashion plays with symbols unconcealed

If we cannot waken, dreams will  fool,
As on our monstrous war horses, we mount
I feel it now : our “fantasies” blur ” real”

We never can have everything we want
So we learn that other peoples count
Fashion plays with symbols unconcealed
But fantasising may lay waste to all

l

https://ticer-swim.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/war

II

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

Ezra Pound in 1913
IV
These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case. . .
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

Died some, pro patria,
non “dulce” non “et decor”. . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V
There died a myriad,
and of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered book

http://ticer-swim.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/john-keats-1795-1821-here-lies-one.html

“When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated ­ not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children: I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I hope enough so to let you see that no despondence is to be placed on what I said that day.”

‘Moods of my own Mind’: Keats, melancholy, and mental health

On mindfulness: “The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.”

To George & Georiana Keats 1819

Negative Capability

“… – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

“Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!”

To George & Georgiana Keats, May 1819.