The Nightmare Complex

To write a poem I dream an undreamed dream
The woods in France deformed by 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 simple 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 your screams

Can any see the woods as Dante aimed
To recreate the moment where we change?
To write a poem embodies soldiers’ dreams
Nightmares dark yet piercing wartime themes

Thinking about a poem I wrote after my husband died

Why I am writing this is because when I wrote the poem below it took am unexpected turn.I wrote

I thought maybe I’d follow,
To see where you have gone

Which is how many of us feel when bereaved.
But the next line was a total surprise

But there’s a hand upon this tiller That is not mine alone.

So another part of my mind was sending me a message that I must not decide by myself that I should follow my husband {I would never do that unless I was terminally ill but many of us feel that way]

.That another part of me or my soul is saying:

The hand upon my tiller
The mystery of the dark
The unknown one who lives in me
And sings like a skylark.

I am more than ” me” or my conscious self and if you believe in God you might say God has other plans.
I hope he likes my short hair!
We don’t need to mention God, we can say a deeper part of our self.

DON’T LEAVE ME

Come back to me,my sweetheart

Don’t leave me all alone.

Come back to me,my darling

I can’t believe you’ve gone.

I’m crying ‘cos I’m feeling blue again.

I’m crying’cos I’m falling like a stone.

Oh, let me tempt you with my beauty

And my voice forever young.

Let me tempt you with my spirit

My laughter and my songs.

I’m crying ‘cos I never did you wrong.

I’m crying ‘cos with you I do belong.

I thought maybe I’d follow,

To see where you have gone

But there’s a hand upon this tiller

That is not mine alone.

I’m crying ‘cos I wrote this old blue song.

I’m crying ‘cos we’ve been apart too long.

The hand upon my tiller

The mystery of the dark

The unknown one who lives in me

And sings like a skylark.

I’m singing ‘cos I wrote you a new song.

I’m singing ‘cos with music we belong.

Well, if it is retweeted it is eternal,in a very real sense

Drawing by Katherine I think
She cut my hair very short so it won’t drop out if I have cancer
Can you get cancer in your hair?
She said it looked thin if it was long but now it is almost invisible.
If you have cancer,it will take your mind off your hair
So that’s where my mind has gone!
Anyway,cancer is common now
Don’t be so insulting.I am poor but educated
That’s a surprise.
Why?
Your vocabulary is small
Well,I am, trying to lose weight so I cut out all the words like Schrodinger, infinity, theologian,mystery,Israel,Jesus,love.Jordan,Negev, glottal stop and algebraic topology
So you must be bright if you can remember them even though they were deleted
What is ” deleted”?
It’s the opposite of defeated.
I can’t believe that.
How about retweeted?
Well, if it is retweeted it is eternal,in a very real sense
We deleted “eternal” but God is still here.
So we can’t delete God?
We can delete “God” but not God.
It’s a bit like the gap between the nameless and the name as Leonard Cohen sang in “The Window”
Was it Windows 10?
No it’s about Love coming in through an open window.
And I suppose it goes out through the door
Eventually it seems to
While we bless the continuous stutter of the Word being made into flesh
Wow.
That was what LC sang
So tell me, can you get cancer in your mind?
It would be a metaphor ,like some part of your mind is out of proportion to the rest
No doubt too much higher education can do that
Yes, they are hoping high fees will save the minds of the multitude
Can I believe the Government is doing it out of Love?
Well, there is faint chance.
Infinitesmal.
Be careful or you will put more weight on!
I’ll have to go dumb
For someone Irish that is hard
I’m only 62% Irish
62.5,actually.
Well,I am trying to accentuate my Viking genes
I do like your jeans.Where did you get them?
I found them on a chair in the bathroom.
Has someone left them?
It’s those elves that come in the night and move all your stuff about.
But their jeans would be very small
It’s all relative.
And so say all of us

My cat

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When Oscar sits on the windowsill
And sees someone within,
His mouth opens wide in soundless cry,
He gives us his cat grin.
Oscar rubs around my legs
He’s such a friendly soul.
He then rolls round upon his back
And waves his long striped tail.
But after Oscar’s greetings done,
He’s off to do his rounds.
He sets off from the white door
To the long thin gardens end.
Every inch of soil and seed
Is subject to his nose.
The garden looks one way to us,
But he can see much more.
I wish that Oscar cat could talk
And tell us what he’s found.
Ten thousand spider’s weaving webs,
A slow worm on the ground.
A million ants climb up the rowan,
I sometimes watch them too.
I see the striped wasps and honey bees
In this small natural zoo.
The hedgehogs sweet have long been gone,
but we have diverse birds.
Oscar sits on my tall stool.
He watches them for hours.

Human Textual Despondency

Freud wrote a book called Moses and Monotheism during the transition he was forced to make to the UK from Vienna owing to fear of Nazi arrest and its consequences.His four sisters all died in those Concentration Camps.In this book he apparently suggests that Moses was Egyptian.Edward Said has also written a book about Moses.Some people say he was a ruler in Egypt who had to leave for political reasons….He was obviously very talented.

Moses was an Eruption I hear.So he had to be kept warm in a basket.
Then Foureyes daughter let him gloat down on the River Nile…till a bull rushed him
Then he turned into a shrew and found God.. or God found him
But God would not let him find Galilee so he found Emilee ,Loelee and Phoeebilee linstead.
He had many children such as Matthew,Hark,Look and Gone.They were all men and had more children with no wives.They didn’t have any women so who did Cain and Abel marry?Eve?
Is this what Freud never realized… men used to marry their mothers and later their daughters who were also their sisters,Crikey,what a blunder
Blimey what is this Bible?Libel?
As we were taught in school Daniel lived with a lion and a lamb.I’m unsure if they had children…. it might explain a lot if they did.
And finally Solomon was very wise.It was easier then when there was no judge or jury to stop him cutting a baby in two… well, he was just pretending.
I say,the Shrews were very shrewd and clever.Like who told Adam and Eve what to do before Masters and Johnson wrote that book.. the Human Textual Despondency?
In any case Adam could not read.In fact they didn’t write either.And to think children here can write so young.Adam and Eve have lots of family
Everybody on Earth… pity they are dead and can’t see us though Goodness knows they’d be shocked if they saw our behaviour with our family.

What it’s like writing a poem

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Sometimes it’s absolutely plain and simple .I am sitting in the garden and this enters my mind:

Random apples
Fall Silently
On unknown Newtons

That was it.

Sometimes I get a sentence,usually a line of song with music which I hum.
Quite often it is not the first line,but a middle line.I write it down when I get home:

Your words have cut my heart like freezing snow

Then I have to decide what kind of poem.It suggests a villanelle to me so I have to get a first line

I opened your last letter with no clue

I like half rhymes
I opened your last letter with no clue
Eating in my garden by the pond
Your sentence cut my heart like freezing snow

I have changed the last line as sentence implies judgement as well as a structure of words

Snow and pond have a lot of rhyming words so I think I can use this stanza to begin

The Letter sent by a coward
I opened your last letter with no clue
Eating in my garden by the pond
Your sentence cut my heart like freezing snow

I opened your last letter then I knew
I mistook your words,I had been conned
I opened your last letter with no clue

My heart beat wildly wondering what to do
My eyes went blind, your hatred was unearned
Your sentence spat on me like hail and snow

Round my mind, like birds emotions flew
No cause nor explanation I discerned
I opened that last letter with no clue

My face turned white,my voice was muted so
Silently, I staggered from my chair
Your sentence cut my soul like freezing snow.

What helps us when we have such pain to bear?
Will we want to live or love or care?
I opened your last letter with no clue
Your sentence, like a rod, beat me anew

I shall leave it like this.I might post it because if I imagine another person reads it I can see it more objectively and may see weaknesses.Sometimes I change it when I move it to a poetry website.