I looked at my blog and saw there are the icons of visitors at the page bottom
So nice to see your faces.Thank you
Month: July 2018
Keep your cool in Vienna
Coma to Vienna for the summer and get a free deodorant on the subway…. it’s their way of coping with 30 degrees of heat!
I doubt if Britons will follow this path… sweat is a turn on for many of us…. although sex on the subway is not legal while the trains are functioning.In this heat you might die!
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Be back soon
I am having some trouble writing.After an excision reopened I have got an infection in it so am having to visit the hospital every 2 days.All the waiting seems to be exhausting me.I hope I can write better soon
My doctor cut off half my arm
I still have some nails and a palm
Jesus rode on an ass
Then crucified was
Be still, in the eye of his storm.
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Bored,have mercy.
Bored,have mercy.
The Law’s gone tepid
For leather and feather
My bloke is sweet and my curtain’s light
The Ten Dependants were found
The Fuse crossed the Desert and blew off unleavened heads
The High Yeast was missing
The Romans struck water
After the sins, a still,small choice.
Is purgatory good news?
Why are you here, Terry Myers?
Have Percy, my cat,oh Pawed!
Sod ’em? Tomorrow.
The Shower of Mable
The power of song
Power and the Lark
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Thank you for the gift of breath.
To the man from Indonesia,to the woman next to me
Sitting on a metal chair, in our A and E
To the former nurse at 80 who helped me when I wept
Thank you to the company I’ve kept
To my sister on the telephone asking how I feel
To my friends who read my writing and care what I reveal
To the man who came from Argos with a Nokia 216
Thank you for the courage and the kicks
To my friend who came to see me, though she’s been bereaved
To the doctor who cut off that lump which my body had deceived
To the blood that clotted quickly so I did not bleed to death
Thank you for the gift of breath.
Thank you for the sunset and thank you for the dawn
Thank you for the the sparrows that I see on the lawn
From Vodafone and Argos,from ancient Greece and Palestine
Thank you for the love and lines
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The flaw in the stages of grief theory
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/megan-devine/stages-of-grief_b_4414077.html
“Grief is the natural response when someone you love is torn from your life. It is a natural process: a process of the heart being smashed and broken open, of reality shifting and hurling in place. It cares nothing for order or stages.
The truth is, you can’t force an order on pain. You can’t make it tidy or predictable. The stages of grief are a net thrown over a fogbank — they help neither to define nor contain.
To do grief “well” depends solely on individual experience. It means listening to your own reality. It means acknowledging pain and love and loss. It means allowing the truth of these things the space to exist without any artificial tethers or stages or requirements.
There is no set pattern, not for everyone and not even within each person. Each grief is unique, as each love is unique. There are no stages capable of containing all the experiences of love and pain. There are no stages of grief.
If we take away this bedrock, what remains? What do we do without those landmarks?
Here are some things to remember:
• There is no finish line. This is not a race. Grief has its own lifespan, unique to you.
• There is no time when pain and grief are completed; you grieve because you love and love is part of you. Love changes, but does not end.
• What will happen, what can happen, as you allow your grief, is that you will move differently with pain. It shifts and changes: sometimes heavy, sometimes light.
• Anger will happen. So will fear, peace, joy, guilt, confusion, and a range of other things. You will flash back and forth through many feelings, often several of them at once.
• Sometimes you will be tired of grief. You will turn away. And you’ll turn back. And you’ll turn away. Grief has a rhythm of its own.
• Grief can be absolutely crazy-making. This does not mean you are crazy.
• There is no way to do grief “wrong.” It may be painful, but it is never wrong.”
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Hit it like a cricket ball that speaks
The gong sounds deep and mellow as it shakes
Polished like the candlesticks we used
And deep inside my secret soul awakes
Strike with all your present force to make
A bang to sock the sleeping and confused
The gong sounds deep and mellow as it shakes
Hit it like a cricket ball that speaks
We’re the humans who the world misuse
While deep inside a secret soul awakes
The sins of all the ages froth and leak
Despite the store detectives in the queues
The gong sounds deep and mellow as it shakes
Fire it like you want to kill with nukes
After this what rubbish can we lose?
Oh, deep inside a sorry soul rebukes
Put it on the late night evening News
Tell the congregation in their pews
The gong sounds deep and mellow as it shakes
And deep inside the world our soul is trapped
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The dictionary
The dictionary,what an instrument! Human beings spoke without its need To gather up our words , define and count Literacy, slow in its intent, Began to spread and offer its rewards The dictionary, what a fine event. Yet there are obstacles we must confront As words begin to rule and to divide. So watch your words , define and always count Sadly language turns malevolent When those in power use sentences to lie. This dictionary,what a grave event. And more when it is used with ill intent Orders sent to murder the despised; Gathering Europe’s Jews for death’s torments. Elsewhere on our earth more genocides Scapegoats suffer,live our suicide The dictionary, what it represents: Scholarship to murder or disturb
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A friend
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Doris Lessing
Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com
Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com
https://io9.gizmodo.com/rip-doris-lessing-one-of-science-fictions-most-indis-1466329614
The beginning:
“Doris Lessing, who died today aged 94, wasn’t just a Nobel Prize-winning literary author — she was also a major hero of science fiction. She was one of the first authors with mainstream acclaim to embrace, and her fiction is worth more than a hundred writing workshops, for aspiring SF authors.
Image via OzSo
Seriously, if you want to write science fiction or fantasy, and you’re interested in learning how to capture the difficult niggly bits of people’s inner lives and their interactions with other people — then you absolutely must read Lessing, both her science fiction and her other stuff. We talk a lot about the importance of worldbuilding in making readers believe in the setting of your story — and Lessing was a master of drawing you into a world and making it feel urgent and real.
Lessing’s writing meant a ton to me, personally — I read her 1962 classic The Golden Notebook for a class when I was 18, and its trippy, intense take on subjects ranging from body-image anxiety to weird social interactions made a huge impression. The Golden Notebook is an astonishingly beautiful book, but it’s also intensely strange and jarring — Lessing takes the “novel of self-discovery” subgenre and twists it into strange, fascinating shapes.”
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Will the new dress fit you like a lie?
It doesn’t matter if you seem depraved
It doesn’t matter how you roll your eyes
One fine day you’ll be in your own grave
What about the millions we have saved
Will God judge us with an eye still wry?
It doesn’t matter if you feel deprived
When you’re dead, you need no bedded cave
No longer in deep sorrow will you cry
One dark day, you’ll be in your own grave
Will it matter how much time we’ve saved?
Will the new dress fit you like a lie?
Noone else is worried or dismayed
Don’t just stand there, get your eyebrows razed
Then wonder why the midges love the flies
One fine day we’ll share our bed with knaves
Is being human now an alibi?
What’s the crime and does God never lie?
It doesn’t matter if the end’s delayed
One fine day we’ll have our name engraved
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Ahed Tamimi freed today
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I know now!
Art by Katherine
I am having problems with my arm which is more painful.GOK when it will heal.Then if the lab gets a negative report I’ll have to have another operation.
On the upside, the terrible heat has gone…. so we’ll be moaning about autumn!
Humans…. never satisfied.
I didn’t know stitches didn’t always work but as my husband used to say
Ye ken the noo.
[You know now]
Aye,I do.
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Best poems about climate change
The Best Poems About Climate Change
A language of change by David Sergeant
‘as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether
to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules’
– Kim Stanley Robinson
We’re sat by the ocean and this
could be a love poem; but that lullaby murderer
refuses each name I give it
and the icebergs seep into our sandwiches,
translated by carbon magic. And even this might be
to say too much. But the muse of poetry
has told me to be more clear – and don’t,
s/he said, for the love of God, please, screw things up.
Ambiguous, I didn’t reply; as we’re sat
by the ocean and I could make it
anything you wanted, for this moment
of speaking – but we have made it
something forever. Together
the weather
is a language we can barely understand;
but confessional experts detect
in the senseless diktat of hurricane
a hymning of our sins, our stupid counterpoint.
Love has served its purpose, now must be
transformed by an impersonal sequester
of me into the loves I will not see,
or touch, or in any way remember.
Perhaps it was always like this – take my hand,
horizon – ceding this land.
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Only my skin
Why do you tell me it’s better this way
Better than dying just after a prayer
It’s only my skin and there’s nothing to say
Life is a wave and it comes every day
Dreams of great beauty , the lessons are clear
Why do you tell me it’s better this way?
You used to like saying, wanna get laid?
But when we grow older these feelings grow rare
You were biting my skin and there’s lots I might say
I liked that some people thought I was staid
When I’d do whatever, if it was a dare
Why do you wonder ,is it better this way?
Skin is so fragile, we touch our dismay
The in and the out are nearer by far
It’s my only skin and that’s all I ‘ll say
Sand in my eyes and smoke in my hair
You are the wolf who keeps his own lair
Why do you tell me it’s better this way?
We’re thinner than skin but there’s nothing to say
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Lyra and the train
Stan was in the conservatory re-watering the cacti and sweeping the ceiling with a new broom.Mary his wife,[or so she claimed],was in the kitchen making cheese scones and bread for their afternoon tea.Their daughter Laura was taking a bath to wash all the blue raindrops from her hair.A peaceful Saturday scene in the Midland town of Knittingham.
Out of the blue,the doorbell rang.It was Annie their widowed next door neighbour.She was wearing a long blue satin dress with a built in train.”I’m off to London now” she simpered.”Can I give Lyra a lift in my train?”
“I believe unless I have strong disconfirmatory evidence, that my daughter is still in the bath.”Stan said defiantly.
Anne entered the house and ran upstairs.There she saw Lyra wrapped in a large blue towel like object.
“Is this a towel?” Lyra asked pertly
.”I have no evidence either way.”Annie announced.
“Where did you get it from?”
“That big blue window”replied the rosy cheeked girl ironically.”It may be a curtain”
“Oh,dear.Have I erred?” she pondered.
“No,you look very clean to me,though one can never be absolutely certain.” Anne said thoughtlessly as she was aware viruses are not black
“I suppose all one can do is to keep the dirt between certain parameters that each must decide for themselves.The Tudors only bathed once a year. And King Henry Vlllth founded the Church of England just so he could get a divorce from himself,not to mention a little gold too.”
Lyra worked for a publisher in Oxford Street,They were always on the look out for new titles and for money.
“Would you ever consider writing a new self help book,Anne?”
“You can make a good deal of money that way.Self help is in vogue now. I was thinking of:How to divorce yourself in three easy stages using self hypnosis.
We already have :How to found your own Church.” and “How to steal somebody else’s Church in three steps.”
Anne was keen to get an interest as since killing her husband for his money,she was feeling lonely,remote and schizoid, and her affair with Stan was proving a bit slower to take off than she had narcissistically expected.
“I am already a unqualified hypnotist.”she lied agreeably
Just then they heard a strange crash.Stan had been standing on his Habitat chair trying to eavesdrop on the women’s conversation,and it had fallen apart under the weight of his hiking boots.He lay on the carpet looking pale with blood running down his aged head.”Can you ring 999 please ?” he yelped .
Lyra looked at the chair.”No,Dad it’s o.k.I can fix this with some U.H.U glue.I have some in my purple tote under all my medication.
She whispered saucily to Anne,”I’ll text you tomorrow,my darling angel.Love the dress.”Lyra was a trans sexual lesbian paramedic you see,as well as a publisher‘s clerk and also did not have other intriguing money making jobs into the bargainas the English say now and then.
Mary was in the kitchen finishing off her baking.She lived in a world of her own mainly focussed on her second hand Raleigh small wheeled shopper bicycle and its wicker basket that she bought in East Anglia or, to be exact,in Wells-next-the sea.It was now grey but still functional like many other towns in Britain and their inhabitants.She put the cheese scones and butter onto a large elliptical plate and went into the dining room followed by Emile her cat ,who was partial to a knob of butter on a Sunday teatime.
Where was his sister Emily, he wondered blankly? Shouldd feline siblings be separated?It seems very unfair
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Norman Foster’s Glasshouse in the National Garden of Wales
N
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I’ll know that I am dead
I can look inside my arm now and it’s red
The blood is glowing like a brilliant jewel
Oh, better being red than being dead
By this blood the body parts are fed
So it’s full of love, it is not cruel
I look inside my arm now and it’s red
Luckily it’s not on my big head
I might feel I was a holy fool
Oh, better being red than being dead
My brain feel full and heavy ,is it lead?
No longer can I study poetry school
I look inside my arm now and it’s red
Once a cure for ills was being bled
It killed more people than a manic mule
Oh, better being red than being dead
I wonder if I broke our Nature’s rule
Improvising with no proper tools
I can look inside my arm now; it is red
When it’s white I’ll know that I am dead
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An interview with Amy Bloom
https://www.writerswrite.com/journal/dec00/mothers-who-write-amy-bloom-12002
Extract:
“What inspired you to write?
 |
I don’t really know, and don’t care if I ever find out. Originally, I wrote mysteries, but then a short story just came to me so I wrote it out and ended up publishing it in an obscure Canadian feminist journal. Later, it was selected to be in The Best American Short Stories. My second and third stories were in Story and The New Yorker, so I was successful in continuing to publish. I had the needed equipment: a typewriter. I didn’t have an MFA (Master of Fine Arts), but if you look over the last 400 years, most of the good writers didn’t, either.
How old were your children when you started to write?
They were 8 and 10, and my oldest son was grown. When I started, I wrote late at night, after they were in bed. I could do that and get away with it because I’m not much of a housekeeper and I didn’t need much sleep. I liked my kids and didn’t care much about my house, so it worked.
From a practical standpoint, how has being a mother affected your writing?
Initially, there was nothing convenient about writing for me, and there were points when writing even interfered. I’d be in the middle of a sentence and someone needed to go to mall for new shoes, so the sentence would be lost, but I felt my primary, most important job was to raise my kids. I did the writing if I had the time, and if I didn’t, I would come back to it. My attitude was: “Sooner or later, I will get this page right.”
| “I wouldn’t be the person I am if I weren’t a mother. I would be very different without children. I would still write, but not in the same way.” |
If I had to do it again, though, I’d try not to work full time. In the beginning, I had a lot of energy and a belief in writing, so I could do it, but I’ve never had unlimited time to just write. There were always limits and deadlines, but it’s what pays the bills. “
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Semi-colons and the rules of writing
,……..the idea that semicolons should be avoided has been fully absorbed into popular writing culture. It is an idea pervasive enough that I have had students in my writing classes ask about it: How do I feel about semicolons? They’d heard somewhere (as an aside, the paradoxical mark of any maxim’s influence and reach is anonymity, the loss of the original source) that they shouldn’t use them. To paraphrase Edwin Starr, semicolons—and rules about semicolons—what are they good for?
As we know, semicolons connect two independent clauses without a conjunction. I personally tend to use em dashes in many of these spots, but only when there is some degree of causality, with the clause after the em typically elaborating in some way on the clause before it, idiosyncratic wonkery I discussed in this essay. Semicolons are useful when two thoughts are related, independent yet interdependent, and more or less equally weighted. They could exist as discrete sentences, and yet something would be lost if they were, an important cognitive rhythm. Consider this example by William James:
I sit at the table after dinner and find myself from time to time taking nuts or raisins out of the dish and eating them. My dinner properly is over, and in the heat of the conversation I am hardly aware of what I do; but the perception of the fruit, and the fleeting notion that I may eat it, seem fatally to bring the act about.
The semicolon is crucial here in getting the thought across. Prose of the highest order is mimetic, emulating the narrator or main character’s speech and thought patterns. The semicolon conveys James’s mild bewilderment at the interconnection of act (eating the raisins) and thought (awareness he may eat the raisins) with a delicacy that would be lost with a period, and even a comma—a comma would create a deceptively smooth cognitive flow, and we would lose the arresting pause in which we can imagine James realizing he is eating, and realizing that somehow an awareness of this undergirds the act.”
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Joan Baez
To the end of love
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Flash
He flashed his white teeth at me as I cycled by; is he a wolf
Flashing is an odd way to try to impress women unless you have a torch fitted to your organ.Don’t nail it on though
Her eyes flashed angrily when she saw his old and shapeless pyjamas
The cat’s eyes flashed as we drove down the hill.Stop that , he said.And stop mioawing as well.
Cats eyes are fittings in the road here which help blind-drunk drivers to see on their way to a car crash
If you go blind, ask for the cat’s eyes to be put into your sockets.Well, try.I am a genius.
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Singing sands
http://www.physics.org/featuredetail.asp?id=16
Short extract:
Sand dunes can be heard ‘singing’ in more than 30 locations worldwide, and in each place the sounds have their own characteristic frequency, or note. In reality the sounds produced are less like singing and more like a low-frequency drone (low frequency corresponds to low notes; bass as opposed to treble). The sounds are emitted when sand cascades down the face of a dune in an avalanche, the cause of which can be the wind, people walking on the top of the dune or even sliding down it.
In 2001 a team of French physicists, including Stéphane Douady and Bruno Andreotti, went to Morocco to study the shape and motion of sand dunes. They became fascinated by the singing of the dunes and began to investigate it in addition to their other research. They found that avalanches they triggered manually produced the same sound as those that occurred naturally, which suggests that the wind doesn’t play a part. They also concluded that the sound is not produced by the dune resonating, as happens in the case of a musical instrument for example, because the frequency of the sound produced is the same for different sizes of dune. Thus the team focused their investigation on the motion of the sand grains, rather than on the properties of the entire dune.
Douady and Andreotti both came up with the idea that the sounds must be produced by sand grains becoming synchronised – moving in definite patterns as they move down the surface of the dune. Their hypotheses differed in that Douady believed the sounds, which after all are just vibrations of air molecules, were produced by air being squeezed out from between the synchronised grains. Andreotti proposed that the sound was due to the surface of the avalanche vibrating the air around it like a large hi-fi speaker. The pair began to follow very different lines of inquiry and ended up in complete disagreement. This, combined with a subsequent quarrel over how best to publish their findings, led to the two researchers falling out. So much so, in fact, that they now avoid each other, despite working in the same small field of physics. Their scientific adventures and disagreements were the subject of an award-winning article in the November 2006 edition of Physics World, the Institute of Physics members’ magazine.”
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The vast Sahara, Sinai, speculate
Like a desert in some foreign place
The vast Sahara, Sinai, speculate
Britain burns to brown with stark embrace
People in hot tempers wince, grimace
Nasty feelings swiftly emanate
From their desert in a foreign place
The weather’s no affront to human taste
We are passive as we cogitate
Britain burns to brown in deep embrace
Let’s relax a little and not waste
The mind’s own symbols, fires that burn to make
A symbol of our wisdom, not disgrace.
The images in mind make love’s own lace
Soft and simple,bends but never breaks
Britain as it browns with sun’s embrace
Fighting over Brexit, love’s at stake
With an unkind madness we’re disgraced.
Like a desert in a hellish place
Britain burns to brown with fire’s embrace.
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Reading poetry is good for your health
https://www.redonline.co.uk/health-self/self/a529337/reading-poetry-is-good-for-you/
“Life moves fast, and so do we: answering emails on the train, ordering shopping from the bath or arranging the next social engagement while our companion’s at the bar. Take time out to read a poem, though, and the verse will slow you down naturally. You need to chew the words of a poem over to really make sense of it – skim reading just won’t do. Read the words aloud if you’re alone (or even if you’re not!) and enjoy the feeling of absorbing something that takes a little time to nourish you.”
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Cat and bhurka
Ray’s queer cat’s in a bhurka
Did Jesus have a boiling temper?
I feel so gay, it is actual
They are waiting for our partitions.
Say but the word and my sole shall be heeled.
Guarded the angels from seven sodomites.
Hail glorious St Hat Trick.
Lord, it’s hearsay.
Lord, I’m worser
Forgive all dear trespassers.
Blessed is the truth of thy broom.
Pay for us now and the whore at our death.
I believe in none , God.
The communion of taints.
But Joseph had a bee.
Jesus wants me in his bathroom.
The Ten Demanding Torments are here.
Have you paid your wrecks yet?
For all the saints who laboured at their tests
For all the painted ghosts
Remember man, thy tart is bust
Ash to ash,dust if you must
Forgive us an hour’s trespassing and we shall be in heaven peering down
Please do as you would have fun by
I am God”s losing person
Satanic Curse.
Pray,Father,give me your denim
Through my vault,through my thieving vault
I heard a bill fall wide.
Why are you my peer,Nehemia? Sorry, why are you so dear?
Jeremiah hid in a wave.He couldn’t fund a whale.
God sent a form and a bad temper, but the Word was not on the Form
She was like a centipede married to a mouse.No end of feet… a feat!
And the Word was with God…. if only it had stayed there silently but no, we must have our tongues wagging all day.
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It was not men being gay that God got angry over
No, Franklin Graham, God Didn’t Destroy Sodom & Gomorrah Because of Homosexuality
“You see, in these ancient cultures homosexuality was largely despised because the one on the receiving end of the transaction was seen to take on the role of a woman– and if there’s one thing they hated more than gays, it was women. Thus, for one man to rape another man wasn’t an act rooted in sexual desire, but an action rooted in humiliating and demoralizing that person. It would have been an action to strip them of their manhood. “
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I left my blood
The peach coloured dress
I wore to the surgery
Got my blood on it.
Since I came back home
The dress has disappeared
Also the blood has.
I have more blood than
I have got a lot of blood
I love my own blood
But we don’t show it
Except via rosy cheeks
Blood is too private
We don’t menstruate
Without some gear to hide the blood.
We don’t parade it
Yet it has beauty
Jesus’s blood is sacred
Our blood is our life.
Who sent my blood to heal?
Who takes care of my body?
Who dwells inside me?
Why are we proud-willed
When power is not ours to wield?
Be humble, oh earth,oh people.
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When one receives
The stitches in my arm come out today
They’re biting my soft flesh to my dismay
I’d like to cut them now with scissors here
Yet as it’s my right arm,I feel some fear
Without my conscious thought, the wound has healed
This itching and this pulling’s all I feel
Noone else has seen my arm so white
With marks the doctor made under bright light
You did well, he muttered as he fled
Dismayed by all the blood his scalpel shed
He told me he’d not pay my laundry bill
Even if I put him in my Will
See how humans help each other live
When one receives, the other can then give
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Purple,heather, green, the colour leaps
I have washed my winter clothes today
Now they lie in neatly folded heaps
The humid air is hot and yellow gray
Needlecord and wool in colours gay
Purple,heather, green, the colour leaps
I have washed my winter clothes today
Velvet jacket, smart wool coat disgrace
The hippy girl whose hair was long and sweet
The humid air is hot and yellow gray
The cleaning shows the dirt to my dismay
It never disappears, though thrashed with heat
I have washed my thicker clothes today
Housework is an old folks form of play
Dirt is sent to rivers where fish creep
The humid air is hot and yellow gray
Into little corners beetles creep
While I have the hoover none can sleep
I have washed my winter clothes today
The humid air is hot , the water’s gray
How my heart sings 