Will Jesus ride  a  pure white horse in heaven?

Where you live it’s zero thirty seven
Past midnight,past illusion, past despair
Did Jesus, when he died, believe in heaven?

Of his apostles ,there were left eleven
To fight amidst the scrum of human war
Where you live it’s zero thirty seven

When he died the earth itself was riven
The elements electrified   and far
Did Jesus, when he died,  conceive of heaven?

You’re behind me so you have not risen
But lie abed with love soaked skin and hair
Where you live it’s zero thirty seven

Look  with sharpness and with broader vision
Relax your eyes from superhuman stare
Did Jesus when he died arrive in heaven?

The universe of meaning is your lair
The Word is sacred,captains will declare.
Where you live it’s zero thirty seven
Will Jesus ride  a  pure white horse  in heaven?

 

 

So many people

IMG_0608

Life is  lonely in the city here
We left our birthplace seeking  work that paid
So many folk, yet nobody is near.

The mass of crowds  brings on a paranoia
While buildings, once thought beautiful, decay
Life is   alien in the city here

From the doorways ugly faces leer
Like evil children,  tortured by dismay
Many people,  nobody who’s near.

The birds don’t sing  I seem to hear them jeer
Then fly in circles in a fierce display
Life is alien in the city here.

My eye is dry, it lacks a single tear
As I am neo- static with despair
Many people,  nobody who’s near.

Why can’t I be merry, if not gay?
Why do thoughts so savage my heart flay
Life is  lonely in the city here
So many folk, so few will come  to cheer

 

Am I the only poet that bothers you?

I hate your poetry and your stories too
Poetry is too vague and too  unclear
Why tell me this  when I am feeling blue?

Am I the only poet that bothers you?
Does Shakespeare’s writing fill your heart with fear?
He hates my poetry and my stories too

Critics ignore mood and suffering’s clue
A half thought is a nonsense,that is clear
He tells me this  when I am feeling blue

Use the means to find the ending true
Do not labour so that you can smear
She hates my poetry and my stories few

I’ll be what you intend if you are you
For truthfulness can in its way  endear
He tells me lies  but one day he will rue.

In our life the unknown source will steer
To us it’s feared, to him it’s always clear
Irate  with poetry; gored by stories too
Why tell me this  when I am feeling you?

Is poetry for everyone?

Photo0027http://www.oaklandmagazine.com/November-2017/Making-a-Case-That-Poetry-Is-for-Everyone-Not-Just-the-Elite/

 

 

“Is it question or declaration? Minus punctuation, it is either/or and both. Written with wonderful passion, crushing honesty, brevity, and flair, Zapruder addresses a question he has been asked or has been asking himself for nearly 25 years. At the root of the question, he suggests, are people taught that understanding and appreciating poetry requires elite education. People who “don’t get it,” therefore, are dullards, duds, dumb. It’s no wonder we walk away from Whitman or toss the Keats for less intimidating literary kicks in novels, nonfiction, and social media. By abandoning the genre, Zapruder argues, readers risk losing out on poetry’s “places of freedom, enlivenment, true communion.”

The Oakland author, Saint Mary’s College associate professor, and The New York Times Magazine poetry editor in 2016 delves into the ways “poetry makes meaning.” His personal encounters with poetry cast a memoir-like tone that renders the dissection of poems instantly alive and prickly with dynamic tension. While reading Zapruder’s coming-of-age-through-poetry story, the thrill drawn by him—and all poets who played or play imaginatively with words—is genuine (when it comes to personal accounts) or well supported by reference to poets’ journals or second-person records and documentation.

Don’t mistake “play,” with frivolity, because Zapruder explores in rich detail and convinces with keen insight evidence that poetry throughout history has held social and political power, defined civilizations, briskly captured complex concepts like “nobility,” or preserved culture and language that might otherwise be lost. Many poems Zapruder dissects dazzle with reductive language that nevertheless captures a universe of meanings.

Essentially, Why Poetry portrays poems as vibrant, contemporary spaces in which imagination rules. Which leads Zapruder to a central premise and arguably the book’s strongest message: Certain times—or, even more so, uncertain times—make poems vital. Post the 2016 election, students in his graduate seminar were despondent or “wandering through anxious, uncertain, shifting futures.” He read to them one of his favorite poems, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” by Frank O’Hara. Making them laugh, the opening stanza offers subtle humor and acceptance despite being “different.” A following stanza encourages them to “always embrace things, people earth / sky stars, as I do, freely and with / the appropriate sense of space.””

God’s  richness   falls like tears from his great eyes.

Photo1093Photo1092

Such complex beauty lasts for a short time
We create photos  for our memory bank
God is rich and richness is no crime

Rich plays are  enacted in our dreams
They are lost and have no  name or rank
Natural beauty lasts for a brief time

Is our life elaborate  a game?
Surely we are grateful ,offer thanks
God is rich and richness is no crime

Each moment  must be kissed, if but by rhyme.
Beauty  dwells in  beads of moments strung.
Their beauty  is not finite in love’s time

The church bell rings for those with memories lame
And as it chimes, eternal is each ring
God  be praised; such  praising is no crime

Spring is  here, I hear the birds in song
The nestlings shiver, sensing human wrongs
Such complex beauty lasts for  such short times
God’s  richness pools like tears from his great eyes.

The broken lamp

I cannot mend the lamp that we both chose
The top and bottom split when  he fell down
But I can make it look as if it glows

The candle burns with fragrances of rose
That takes away my sadness and my frown
I cannot mend the lamp that we both chose

I find it hard to  bear the pain of loss
The concept is  more verbal than it’s noun
But in my room  the candle  brightly glows

In Blythburgh church, a lighted candle  bless
See, the painted saints wear golden crowns!
I  will bear this breakage and its cost

I will get the strength to bear my cross
Oh,haul me, holy one, if I fall down.
Beyond  these lights we sense  the Light of God

Bless the hand that points us past the known
Where each of us must travel,all alone
I cannot mend the lamp that we both chose
I  stumble in my grief amongst the low

Maybe grace

Distant sparrows faint but musical
The rasp of the  papery pages when I closed my book
Click of the keys
A faint humming in the air
A blackbird
The boiler comes on with a jolt
I see the lamp and it shadow  on the wall
The blue glass bottles
A book I thought I’d lost
My sewing basket
The other lamp is lit.
My nose sniffles
My back is aching
I dreamed my husband was here and we were packing to go away in a hurry
I feel good when I get into bed in cold weather
My husband still looks the same.He wants me to move but it’s too late.I have forgotten something
I wake up with a happy heart
The hot water feels good on my skin
I drink tea in mug after mug
This chair may be too high
I smell the candle burning
Smell  air coming through a crack in the frame
I feel my skin calling out
My feet on the floor
Gravity
And maybe grace

Take care of the Pence

The mail men were tagging my head as I am much wanted

I make a hack  bleat

Take care of the Pence and the hounds will take care of themselves

Wake a leg or two

Make love  tracks

Shake the wit on Hampstead Heath

Fake a cake using rubber and glue

Take the guilt off the winger’s bed

Take  your upper hand off

Take umbrage as a gift  if invited to tea in the UK

Take with a rain of salt water on ice

They married but he has taken  her back

 He has  the walk of a Devil

Stalk the talk

Talk through one’s cat

Talk to the right hand

Not at all gory

There’s no such thing as a free hunch

Lazy  old sayings

That seems tawdry

It’s not a crime and it’s not a sin but it hurts

nearby-salisbury-stonehengeWhat  name do we give to an action by another person that hurts us badly and yet they have not broken the law?
Like they ring up and say we should have put a comment on their blog when  they know we’ve been very busy at work… then we have not visited their
FB page this week… or some other complaint.There is a disparity sometimes between how we are and how others see us.We may be depressed and hardly able to function,they are cross we didn’t phone them for a chat
[ie  they moan for 36 minutes whilst we listen..}

Maybe it is a sin.Nowadays we don’t use that word.But if we do not use our imagination to understand another person’s life and trials then we are  lacking in some way if this happens a lot.

In psychoanalysis it seems that people do such things because of an identification with an archaic mother image or because they were punished for wetting the bed… there is no personal responsibility..

Some of us go the other way and are over-responsible even in some cases people think they have caused the Gaza conflict or another war when they are actually mentally unwell.They are tormented.

We need to be in the middle.We need to learn to not respond to other’s excess demands and if we start to think we caused the trouble in Palestine we need to visit the doctor and take a friend for support

The alphabet by Karl Shapiro

Photo0224 rty.jpg

The letters of the Jews as strict as flames
Or little terrible flowers lean
Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages,
Singing through solid stone the sacred names.
The letters of the Jews are black and clean
And lie in chain-line over Christian pages.
The chosen letters bristle like barbed wire
That hedge the flesh of man,
Twisting and tightening the book that warns.
These words, this burning bush, this flickering pyre
Unsacrifices the bled son of man
Yet plaits his crown of thorns.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-alphabet-5/

Where go the tipsy idols of the Roman
Past synagogues of patient time,
Where go the sisters of the Gothic rose,
Where go the blue eyes of the Polish women
Past the almost natural crime,
Past the still speaking embers of ghettos,
There rise the tinder flowers of the Jews.
The letters of the Jews are dancing knives
That carve the heart of darkness seven ways.
These are the letters that all men refuse
And will refuse until the king arrives
And will refuse until the death of time
And all is rolled back in the book of days.

Will any human see?

This change of life means I am never me
The  me I was when you lived by my side
Who I am now,  nobody can see

We walked on long white  beaches edging sea
Where horses cantered in the spacious wide
But changing life means I am not  your me

If you were here I know you would agree
That losing half our soul makes us afraid
Who I am ,  will any human see?

 

I live  and feel like  lost, cold refugee
Even as the memories pale and fade
For changing life means I don’t feel like   me

I  love and cherish your  red maple tree
The sun gleams through those twigs and sparrows play
Who I am ,  will any human see?

We take for granted what’s a normal state
The world seems solid,human, will not break
This change of life means I am never me
Who I am now, even I can’t see

 

If you know this you can become a British citizen

I’ve got art’s writers in my joints
Why did the retina detach? It had avoidant personality disorder
Why did I get migraine in my heart? Because I had not got  the head for it
Why did my artery spasm?  The heart has its reasons; the arteries we don’t know.
Apparently my heart has become the holy grill
I can still fear angels
Why did I write this nonsense? I envy Lear
Why did Lewis Carroll?
Do you like nonsense? I do.

Do you really believe in Flu?

article-2188441-148A1945000005DC-851_634x462 (1)She’s got  foot in mouth disease.
The doctor says I have got weasels,
Then she got harlot’s fever and went  out blazing
Men get about or is it stout?
It’s chick and fox
Do you really believe in Flu?
My sister had  onion surgery last year  and she still weeps.
She said she feels cogitated all night so I let  her learn Boolean logic
I don’t want a mare tonight.I am married.
Why do we scheme unconsciously?
Was it entirely hands in glove?
I’ve gone mad and fallen in love.My husband  had called  for release.
Housewives knees are often a nuisance.Why not remove them>

I could run through the entire alphabet

I spend an hour in worry everyday
From lists of all disorders on the net
Then  the Wars which on the feeble prey

I wonder sometimes if I might be gay
Although one’s gender is not quite preset
I spend an hour in worry everyday

War in Syria,Palestine. and more
I could run through the entire alphabet
To name the Wars which on  so many prey

I give an extra hour , you cruel whore!
She wants me to be anxious tete a tete
I spend more hours in worry everyday

If I’m tired I cannot shut that door~
The conscious self’s invaded, thoughts preset
Don’t name the Wars, just kneel and say a prayer

Has the Devil laughed and  placed his bets
That the human race the world will wreck?
I spend an hour in worry everyday
I’ve had enough,I’m more  inclined to pray

 

 

An inspiring article

S.-Bushra-Khanhttp://www.patheos.com/blogs/mostlymuslim/2017/11/fighting-stigma-mental-illness-story-muslim/

“When my children left home, I became an artist again at the encouragement of my eldest son. I did write for magazines and newspapers while they were growing up, but I did not do artwork. It was only after the death of my father, as a way to deal with my grief, that I decided to stand up on my own to feet and paint after so many years. I had a mentor and with his help, I managed to have my first show and began to exhibit. I also joined artist groups and the local Interfaith Council.””

 

 

The mystical poet who can help you lead a better life

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170109-the-mystical-poet-who-can-help-you-lead-a-better-life

“Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz (c. 1320-1389) is one of the most beloved poets of the Persians [Iranians}, and is considered by many – from different cultures – to be one of the seven literary wonders of the world. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe both agreed. As Emerson said of Hafiz: “He fears nothing. He sees too far, he sees throughout; such is the only man I wish to see or be.” And Emerson gave Hafiz that grand and famous compliment, “Hafiz is a poet for poets.”

Hafiz has no peer – Goethe

Both Goethe and Emerson translated Hafiz. And after Geothe’s deep study of him, simply – though remarkably – stated, “Hafiz has no peer.”

Hafiz poems were also admired by such diverse notables as Nietzsche and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose wonderful character Sherlock Holmes quotes Hafiz. Garcia Lorca praised the Sufi poet. Johannes Brahms was so touched by his verse he used several in his compositions. And even Queen Victoria was said to have consulted Hafiz in times of need – which has been a custom in the Middle East for centuries.  The Fal-e Hafiz, is an ancient tradition in which a reader asks Hafiz for advice when facing a difficulty or at an important juncture in their life – treating his books as an oracle and opening them with a deep wish from their soul for guidance.

Hafiz

A ceramic tile – probably painted many years after his death – shows a likeness of the poet Hafiz (Credit: De Agostini/Getty Images)

The range of Hafiz is indeed stunning and provocative at times:

I am a hole in a flute that the Christ’s breath
moves through – listen to this music.

Then this, from another poem,

Look at the smile on the Earth’s lips this
morning, she laid again with me last night!”

Even non-believers psychology may be altered by religion

Photo0224 rty.jpghttps://theconversation.com/religion-may-alter-your-psychology-even-if-youre-a-non-believer-83506

 

“Explicit and implicit attitudes

Explicit attitudes are those people can call to mind consciously and can report when asked: for example “carrots are good for me” or “God does not exist”.

By contrast, people have little or no awareness of their implicit attitudes — the learned associations between ideas in their minds, such as how easily the concept “carrot” brings to mind another concept like “bland,” or how easily the word “God” brings to mind “existence”.


As these examples illustrate, implicit and explicit attitudes can clash. It’s possible for a person to say they “love carrots” while unconsciously bringing negative associations to mind about them. Or, to say “God does not exist” while unconsciously bringing to mind ideas of God’s existence.

In this way, it makes sense for nonbelievers to get nervous at the thought of daring God to do harm.

How attitudes shape health

The idea that mismatches between explicit and implicit attitudes can create conflict is consistent with the theory of cognitive dissonance.

Studies exploring this psychological phenomenon found that conflict between your behaviour (for example, meeting parental expectations of being a submissive daughter) and your own perception of who you are (for example, being an independent woman) was associated with relatively high scores on measures of neuroticism and depression, and low scores on measures of self-esteem, compared to people whose behaviours and self-perceptions better align.

Likewise, people whose implicit and explicit attitudes about their self-esteem are misaligned (those who report high self-esteem, but hold negative unconscious associations about the self, or vice versa) suffer negative outcomes. They are more likely to become defensive in response to negative feedback, to suppress their anger and to take days off of work for health reasons.

Might cognitive dissonance also be at play in the context of religion?

Religion and health

Cognitive dissonance, and the degree of alignment of implicit and explicit beliefs might help us understand relationships between religion and health. Indeed, positive outcomes of religious belief could help explain why implicit beliefs persist in nonbelievers.

study of over 400 white American men showed that those who attended church had lower blood pressure, and a separate study found having a religious affiliation is associated with a greater sense of well-being. Tweets posted by Christians have been interpreted to reflect greater happiness and social connectivity than those from atheists, and believers in God are reported to be less anxious about their eventual death, and more certain about the meaning of their existence.

But things aren’t so simple when religious belief is less robust. People with moderate religious beliefs report lower well-being than those with very strong or very weak beliefs. Many factors will be at work here, but one to consider is that moderate believers are more likely to hold conflicting implicit and explicit beliefs.

 

 


What if….?

6618

Don’t go out like this
Some followers of Freud believe that psychoanalysis can cure everything even measles!Freud himself was less certain.I had to laugh one night when I was reading about someone getting better after 8 years of 4 times a week therapy.Not completely better.Just a bit.
I wonder who was paying.And of you are already quite old ,8 years is a  long time.Maybe it is a substitute for life.
Look at it differently.
In any image, there is a figure and a ground.Therapy is about you, the figure.
But if you change the ground the image will change.To me. that implies that the environment might be making a person suffer.If they can change their surroundings then their anxiety might decrease.
It is easier when you are young as you may be able to go to college, ideally a long way from your home.
I found that made a difference to me.I am sure you can think of other ways
Don’t let people hurt you, tell  you that you lack the intelligence to get a degree or be a doctor or a bricklayer.If you can speak, read and write then you can with hard work get your degree especially if you have one or two friends who will study with you.Nobody knows how to measure intelligence.Self-belief is very valuable.Many people do degrees as mature students,probably now at the OU
Eat and get fresh air.We are bodies!
Stop ruminating if possible and wash up instead
Will you wet yourself at the party?Will you go red? How dreadful it will be to have everyone laughing at you.
Believe me, you will cope with whatever happens,,,, eventually
It might take a long time, you may never be anxiety free but in this world, I imagine you are not alone.We are all more simply human than otherwise

The shadow of Europe

Did we think the Holocaust was gone
And European life could carry on
When US soldiers freed Jews from Belsen.

Muse upon the loss of lives and hope
Children captured as they played and wrote
Then died in thousands, gazed on by the Pope.

Remember too it’s not the victims sole
All of Europe bled in heart and soul
What strength is needed to make remnants whole?

The guilt may be unconscious but it’s there
Attacking us inside and everywhere
We are living yet we bear the scars.

Does it make this less that elsewhere too
Many folk are murdered,not just Jew?
One day soon the police might arrest you.

The Jew is Jesus crucified anew
Next time ,think of this, do we know who ?
Did we think the Holocaust was gone
When US soldiers freed Jews from Belsen?

What a cliche

My mind is absolutely elastic
Snow incidents fill caverns at  Malham
I am recording napalm  and phosphorus
Love is here according to the text flirts
I was defaced by the whole mind’s movement
 Her face is up his sleeve
 I know how Achilles feels
Have a placid toast to the unseen
Decor doesn’t stall only me
He crossed the cupboard on foot
Tact and faith are good companions
Pack the fool off to Tequila
I plucked the guided ghost’s eyebrows
Faction and Compunction
Elections,gunpowder  and guns barred
Take an egg and swallow it whole
Bad egg disbarred
It resulted  in  her perjury
Admissions will mail you
Advanced learning fear  and phobia
Frayed by his mown meadow
After all it’s red and fun
After my own start  I relax

Succumb not to black despair

 

A force  far deeper than our anger

Elemental as a storm

Annihilating all before it

Terror gives our rage its form.

This  force saying self is threatened

Runs to  rise and to protect,

Most murderous when  we’re most alarmed

Rage  the enemy detects.

Over-riding other feelings

Depriving of the power to think

Like a nuclear  tsunami

Disconnecting human links.

Reddened vision,focused,narrow,

Eyes locked onto enemy’s

All the wider context losing,

Wipes out  our good memories

Like a mother tiger fighting,

And the cornered eagle’s force;

We will destroy  what we think other

Without  bitter,pained remorse.

Nature made such to protect us;

Yet  our  perception can be wrong.

Once the flood of feeling takes us

All reflections seems too long

Later, if we see our victims,

Will we know that we have erred?

For  hate deceives ourselves and others

When our inmost terror’s  bared.

How can we step back and ponder,

See life from a wider view?

How can we become less blinded,

So  we see our world anew?

Succumb  not to final despond

Succumb not black despair.

Always there are those who see.

Always  there are those that care.

Tempered by reflective wisdom

Rage can change  when understood.

When we find another being

Who contains our frightful flood.

Post-truth, post-God, post meaning, post remorse

 

Who should speak, which persons have a voice?
Can we trust the ones who’ve told such lies
Post-truth, post-God, post meaning, post remorse?

If we’re wounded, who shall give recourse?
Does it matter to them what we’re tortured by?
Who should speak, which people own their voice?

If we hear bad news, what is its source?
See the bodies  hear the babies cry,
Post-truth, post-God, post meaning, post remorse?

Can we spread democracy by force?
Is it still democracy post-war?
Who should speak, which people own their voice?

Which of all the methods is the choice?
What is politics the reason for,
Post-truth, post-God, post meaning, post remorse?

If I speak, will you believe I lie?
The tongues of angels whisper, what of Troy
Who should speak, which people have a voice?
Post-truth, post-God, post meaning, post remorse

What makes you happy?

Photo0224 rty rtyu88

I wonder what makes you happy.I hope you are happy.And if not, what do you do?

So,for me. I feel happy when I have completed some task and have a sense of achievement because then I can relax and sit staring into space because staring into space makes me feel happy.And if there is a tree there,even  better.I like to sit with maybe music but no talk.I like not to talk.

If I am not happy,I do whatever I need to do as slowly and carefully as I can.And  think what I’d say to another person who felt like that:It’s alright to be sad.Be sad but don’t wallow in it.

Then I’d make some tea and listen to Die Winterreisse which is very sad but it makes me feel happy…perhaps it expresses what I can’t express.

like tea more than coffee and I like home made bread made in someone else’s home.
I am no good at sewing but I like turning up hems because using my hands makes me happy too.I would like to do more with my hands.I believe that is good for the brain.

I like going out at dusk when people put on the lights and I stare into their windows to see how they have decorated their rooms.So don’t pull the curtains,please.Is it legal?I am surprised how bare some rooms are..

I like helping blind people across the road as long as that is what they want.

I don’t like it when men push me or let doors close when I am going through.At Christmas people get very aggressive shopping.

I  used to like hearing people quote adages like

There’s many a true word spoken in jest

but I don’t think people say  such things now…. more like

What the hell are you doing playing ball in the street?

And who says now

I am in the doldrums  [from the Ancient Mariner]

Or even,

To be or not to be.

That is bad for my digestion

Is this a dagger I see before me?

No,it’s the potato peeler!

That’s my offering

The war goes on

When you are far,
so
far
away,
The longest night,
The shortest winter day,
will be places where
I
might die.
The heart’s interior
no-one else
Can view.
When you are lost,
I cannot find
your face…
Its outline on the pillows,
My fingers shaped to trace…
The new design,
the stellar rhyme,
Where have you gone?
You slipped from out my arms.
You slipped away.
Was night or day
Ever cut by such a narrow line?
In your embrace I lay.
You seemed so strong.
Yet,sighing, took the path away.
I can’t see where
Is
it
night?
Or is it
day..?
I tried to write
to bring white light,
It’s dark, and still.
I long for you to come.
Oh,will we ever quite
Find out our way?
Or is that pure illusion?
As we stagger through
the wandering furrows
in the fields
They shoot us down.
What is this confusion?
The war goes on
The world goes round
The mirror gapes at each new clown.
But in a crack, a seed may grow..
I can’t see you,
But yet,it’s so.