Mary lay  in bed sighing and wishing Stan were there to bring her a cup of tea
All alone and it wasn’t even a Bank Holiday.So she had no excuse for being short of money.
She remembered her days at Oxgrudge University studying Dysfinancial Analysis and Knotology.How she swept down the  library stairs knocking youths over with her large  black gown and  her   continuous humming like a human bee
Men fell over like ninepins while Mary’s head was in another space so she never noticed the devastation and disorder  she caused simply by existing
What was it about this   tall, skinny ,shortsighted woman that had such a powerful effect? Nobody will  ever know now ,least of all Mary
Then she  recalls how she met her husband to be as he stood outside Boots  Pharmacy swallowing a handful of antidepressants  with a glass of lemonade and brandy the asssistant had given him free of charge as he looked so sad
Mary tripped over  his foot as she looked around for her stolen bicycle.
Hello, he cried.I am Stan Brown
Well, how kind ,may I have a sweet from your box?
Yes, I shall give you everything
Can’t you be more explicit ,she said shyly.In mathematics   we are very precise and careful.
Mary  was embarrassed at her recollections.He might have been a tramp or an unemployed  milkman.
Would you like to go on the river,  he murmured?
I can’t walk on water, she responded
I mean in a boat,Stan replied
Why  not, she whispered.The water’s wide and I  cannot cross
Is that a metaphor, he asked her?
I suppose it might be an allegory.It’s a song.
I say, you are clever, aren’t you?
Is that accurate? My IQ is only 80 but I am teaching  pure mathematics at Heartwords College.
How chaste,Stan replied.Do they pay you well?
I wouldn’t teach free there, she answered.Even so I can’t afford another bike and the problems I have to solve each week  are extremely difficult.
You mean  like cooking  your own meals?
No,I mean the maths questions, she answered.I don’t eat much.It takes me 10 hours a day to solve the student’s  problems
Well,I will take you out for a roast dinner.You look like you’ve got anorexia
I can’t have that, she answered.It’s not been invented yet!
Well, you look like  celery if it were white.
That’s not very  nice,Mary muttered.It’s usually a flower.
You look more like a grass stalk ,he informed her scientifically
And somehow after that they were married and living in Knittingham a  lovely old town in  the Northern hills with their delightful cat Emile and a  BT telephone.Eventually  they got some furniture and a bed.But at first they never noticed the petty trivialities of life
Alas.Stan is dead and Mary is struggling to feed herself again.Emile is unhappy  as he loved Stan  like a father.
I’d better go to the Bank before I forget my PIN number, she thought.I used to buy so many lovely books and socks and cutlery and now I eat off the Guardian and it’s £2  a day! Where is the crockery?
The newsagent rang the bell.You owe me money
Yes,I am just off to  the Bank, she told him quickly
Maybe you should get dressed, he told her in a kindly tone.
These pyjamas are all the rage now
Not with Indian women, he replied.
Quite so,Mary mumbled.They look better than I do.Can I borrow a few saris?
After you pay the bill.
You win,Mary told him politely.I have my debit card waiting for me.
Where?
In a cup on the book case
Don’t tell me cups are the new handbags, he laughed
Actually, that is a creative idea…. and  jugs.I need a new look
And so do all of us.

Fancy having to  calculate how tall a hill was by  using projective geometry  before it had been invented.That  really affects me.
But  if we did not have mass markets we would not  need to measure our waists.
Measuring.. do we need it to keep getting more precise like  I am a  million atoms wide and  the square root of 2 long,Who am I?

To be  of will grim
Oh,hell, he will grin
Onward instant soldiers
He who would by talent see
To be a madman
Who is a pagan?
The Lord is deafened
The Lord’s own weapon
Guardian angels, did you see  Newsnight?
Underneath your arches,I’ll scream  till  you see me
Blessed is the word in the clue.
Did you ever get to Devon?
Oh,well. Orwell?
Near lustful daughters he needs me
He imbibed my glass of spirits.
Wraith of our Fathers  living will
Good will to all men kind.
God of our blathers
Oh,little  wall of Bethlehem.
Jerusalem was  built  on  a hill.They couldn’t afford to move the hill ,you see
[I made that up]

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/laura-van-den-berg-by-heart/567964/

If anything happiness is a feeling of being essential”
― Fay Weldon

Pay attention to the feeling heart
Do not crush yourself   before you start
What seems mad and stupid may be wise
A new world may live just beyond your eyes
Revealed by  pen,constructed as  is Art

Be uncertain like Rene Descartes
Live through moments unseen on the chart
 Self deception can be caught,  surprised
Pay attention

We learn to see what is ,despite the dark
Yet we need  our friends when truth’s too stark
From hesitation ,truth at last arrives
Never total, never undisguised
A whale may seem at times a deadly shark
Pay attention

One of the most profound and universal realizations of later childhood, a realization that probably is never totally integrated, is the discovery that one’s parents are not necessarily representative of the human species, that one has grown up in an idiosyncratically structured family with its own peculiarities and dramas.

• Stephen Mitchell
• Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 275

On Quora someone’s asking for advice
Can they wear thigh high boots and  few clothes
Their grammar is   too insubordinate
As house flies  on your  cake make icing late

Are there rules for  everything we do?
Can I wear tomatoes  on my shoe?
Must I wear my  dressing gown in bed?
Could I wear the eiderdown instead?

Then morals clutch and ethics give us strain
As we kiss our dearest husband ‘s counterpane
Should I  apologise for drinking tea?
Is there still  a dyke on Zuiderzee?

Why should we believe what we read there?
Or come to think, not there but anywhere?
We want some one to talk to,  it is true
Why not tell a tiger in the Zoo?

How to Format Your Book for Kindle Using Microsoft Word in 6 Easy Steps

I find it  is not as hard as I thought but it  uses up energy.Of course I should have read this article before I began.There are books that tell you more if you  look on Amazon/Google or in your bookstore

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/01/ian-dreiblatt-is-the-brooklyn-poet-of-the-week-thank-goodness

Extract:

After the low start to the week, may this excellent interview with Brooklyn poet and translator Ian Dreiblatt at Brooklyn Poets cheer you up. Quick background: Recent translations include Gogol’s The Nose and Comradely Greetings, a book of prison correspondence between Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Slavoj Žižek. Last year he published two chapbooks: sonnets, from Metambesen, and barishonah, from DoubleCross Press. We’re so lucky to get to know a bit of this wonderful mind–read (and listen to) it all here.

Who were your poetry mentors and how did they influence you?

Oh wow, very hard to list everybody! I’ve learned so much from so many different people. But any list I made would include Robert Kelly, who turned me on to a huge number of the poets that have meant the most to me, and has for all the nearly twenty years I’ve known him been exorbitantly generous with response, encouragement and suggestions.

Ann Lauterbach was another early teacher whose responses to the work she let me share with her, even many years later, continue to bounce around productively in my head.

For a while when I was younger I lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, and had the incredible luck of knowing and working with Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. He was a mentor in a very literal way—he would sit down with translations I had made of his work, and go over them in great detail, explaining what, from his perspective, was working, and what wasn’t.

Peter Dimock is another friend and mentor, who’s lived in Brooklyn for most of the time I’ve known him, altho he just recently moved upstate. Peter’s a novelist, but in a mode of novel-writing that is very nearly poetry, and his thinking about the relationships between writing and editing, the literary and the social, language and power is incredibly nourishing.

If  stuffed cabbage is too much
Have a sprout, from Brussels  lurched
A joint of beef is excess now
Try a calf’s foot  not a cow’s
Try a sausage  stewed in milk
If it spills I shall not wilt
Roast potatoes make me sad
Grill tinned peaches, they’re not bad
Try a carrot for a lark
Eat  it when your mood is dark
Make a salad, apple, nuts
Celery must face the cuts
Walnuts  come in bags not shells
Just as oil comes  out of wells
Why not ask a guest if blue?
I  can’t eat enough for two!

tr

Frail and sad ,the man  is changed
Not  beginning in his course
He’s had the best and now  the worst
He submits to death  arranged

He protects his   family
He’s paid his mortgage filled the Bank
As he ponders spirits sink
What of this must they each see?

He  has got restricted hours
As doctors all  must improvise
None can say what way is wise
The immune system, fearful, cowers

But now  he’ll  bear the setting  sun.
In vocal skies, the eyes of owl
The breath  of cats,  the throats that growl
Michaelmas   and deep autumn

The total darkness earths at last
Midwinter candles, the  great feasts
Hannuka, Christmas,blessed yeast
We’ll rise again but not in haste.

Make the  body’s rhythmic moods
One more way to  hear the tunes
In deep winter’s gathered gloom
Cry, I love you ,cry aloud.

Let the tears of pity come
Gather them to water him
In this place his tree will grow
When with love  his seeds we sow

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/04/your-favorite-poems-on-people-and-power/524874/

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

Don’t you think  the Christians have been rude
Stealing the Hebrew Bible from the Jews?
Should they sue  for plagiarism and more
Changing name and selling in the Store?

Do you think that God  has been purloined
The Old and New, the  stories all combined?
If we own the God of still small voice
Should those  folk who heard him have a choice?

When we stole the stuff from off the Jews
Did unconscious guilt   make us confuse
The God who spoke to Prophets from a  Fire
With Evil Ones who killed his people dear

Oh,Jesus was a Jew, what news ,what ire!
God mistook his lady in the Byre

?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/english-language-destruction-technology-internet-jargon-political-war-poets-a8523796.html

The Cobweb (Raymond Carver Poem)

“A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck
of the house. From there I could see and hear the water,
and everything that’s happened to me all these years.
It was hot and still. The tide was out.
No birds sang. As I leaned against the railing
a cobweb touched my forehead.
It caught in my hair. No one can blame me that I turned
and went inside. There was no wind. The sea
was dead calm. I hung the cobweb from the lampshade.
Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath
touches it. A fine thread. Intricate.
Before long, before anyone realizes,
I’ll be gone from here.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/27/yuval-noah-harari-trump-patriotism-global-threats-sapiens

“Harari also took a dim view of Brexit, which he described as “basically a distraction. I don’t think inherently it’s a bad idea … but the timing is terrible… If the EU breaks up into 28 different countries, it’s going to be much more difficult to negotiate climate agreements, to have a common front against the hi-tech giants. Every minute the UK and EU institutes are spending on Brexit is a minute they don’t spend on climate change. And they spend a lot of minutes on it.

“Also it’s all just a fantasy about being independent. But there are no longer any independent countries in the world. It doesn’t matter what’s written on some document.”

According to Harari, technological disruption – through the rise of artificial intelligence, biotechnology and surveillance programmes – is a threat to freedom, due to the use of personal data by corporations and governments.

“That’s a very big danger,” said Harari, who does not own a smartphone and was meeting press in London to promote his new book about the dangers of accelerating technological development, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. “If we reach a point when governments have the ability to press people’s emotional buttons in a very efficient way, then elections don’t mean anything anymore. And we are quite close to that point.””

After nearly being arrested for accidentally sending out messages with the mirror. Stan got back into the car and drove around King’s Lynn and up past Sandringham.
I’ve been there,said Satan eagerly
Don’t tell me, Stan  begged.Let me keep a few illusions.Or delusions
Satan fell quiet as they  stopped in Hunstanton to see the striped cliffs before tottering along the coast towards Sheringham.
I’d like to go to  Brancaster Beach again,Stan thought, that really is  a beach.In fact he and Mary had once been trapped by the tide.North Norfolk is a dangerous place even without  Satan travelling through
Holkham Hall and beach were a  beloved place.Maybe Satan would like to go in a boat on the lake and visit the shop where paintings are on sale
Wells next the Sea was the old man’s  love.The narrow street where Mary bought a wicker bike basket.The bread shop and the butcher and the big green on the top with lovely houses round it in  a square [ squaring the circle!]
Many happy memories and the rich smell of gorse in the hot sun
When I get home,I shall see if gorse will grow in Knittingham he told Emile.Maybe the soil is wrong though
He took out his Vodafone Smart 7  or 8 and rang an old friend  in Sheringham
Is the cottage free,Fred, he asked?
Yeah, how many people?
Er, it’s just me and the cat . this time,Stan muttered idiotically.Well Satan was in the powder compact so he didn’t need a bed!
OK.I’ll leave the key at the chip shop then.See you soon.Stan.I’m just finishing my book on the Gnostic Imagination.I’ve  learned a great deal  but I’ll happy to finish it.Maybe we could meet for a drink one night
And do you know… they did!

Stan managed to drive from the Wash to Knittingham without accident.Satan was asleep in the bottom of the mirror only wakening when they stopped for a cup of tea in a Restaurant.
But how can Satan drink his tea?
Stan  persuaded Satan that  if he wore Stan’s hat and coat nobody would know he was  not human.After all, many real humans  don’t look human.So Satan went into the Little Chef for his first experience of human life.They all sat down and ordered tea and pancakes with jam and golden syrup.
Woww,said Satan.I might consider apologising to  the Lord if I can eat this every day
Emile looked puzzled:
An apology is not genuine if  it is done for gain, he mewed.
Gosh,where did you get such a clever cat,  Satan asked Stan?
He just turned up looking wet and hungry a few years ago.Then I taught him at home how to speak properly and the basics of ethics but he seemed to know more than I could explain
Both the men stared at Emile as he lapped up the tea from a  white china saucer.I wonder who he really is, they both murmured in a hushed tone.
I have taught him  to swim in our bath and  sometimes he comes for a ride in my bike basket.Once he fell out yet managed to lure a beautiful lady to bring him home as he is tired of my mistress Annie and fancied someone who didn’t wear crimson and magenta together  nor such extraordinary makeup from Lemmings of Wigan and Warrington.
I’ve never heard of them said Satan wonderingly.I didn’t know women actually bought “makeup.”I thought when girls matured their faces went like that naturally/
That’s a bit stupid, said Stan bluntly.But never mind.Let’s carry on  or Mary will worry
Satan decided he would sit with Emile  and stay out of the mirror.He was beginning to look like a human being albeit a rather ugly one
And so say all of us

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/sep/20/art.poetry

Beginning

” we brought most of our books but left all our paintings behind. These were distributed among my brother, sisters and friends for safe-keeping or as gifts. Years later I lamented this, sorely missing these images. One painting in particular haunted me. It had been given to us by a young Guyanese artist, Keith Khan. I remembered its mysterious serenity, its warm background colours, the figure rising like a sphinx from the blue ruins of a wall. Although on visits home I looked for it several times, it wasn’t until seven years ago that I finally found it, behind a bedstead in our old family home. I brought it back with me to England, where it attests to the power of art to haunt us, to stick in the memory and nourish the spirit.

The ability of the artist to transmute paints into forms, shapes and feelings has always been a source of wonder to me. Equally fascinating is the interplay between art-forms – the way poetry, sculpture, music and painting relate to each other. I feel the relationship between painting and poetry is a particularly close one. Both come out of a desire to make something new of the familiar, to capture an experience in a living, concentrated way. Both share a harmony, structure, colour and rhythm; in the compositional balance of a painting, one can almost speak of one colour “rhyming” with another.”

Satan  had been,  for  an hour or two ,inside a solid gold powder compact which  a delightful old lady called Dora had been given by her husband Alf.Alas when Dora saw Satan in her mirror she was not amused.Luckily for Satan the  mirror broke and he was able to escape into the North Sea.
Since Stan and Emile were going home he decided to swim to the Wash and see if he could catch up with them.He is well up in geography unlike the author
Being in the sea was very different from being in the Fires of Hell.Both have their downsides.Still we all have to conpromise  now and then.But why did God let Satan get out of the mirror?
Alf and Dora stuffed with hot tea and  buttery muffins were paddling back to the car park in Cromer where their silver car was waiting
Why is there so much water on the road,Dora asked her amiable husband.
It’s not  been raining, has it?
Well. I saw some canoes sailing down the promenade.What has happened?
Cromer is a very strange place at the extreme  east end of the Norfolk coast.One moment you are facing North, the next East.This is where houses fall into the sea.Officially it is subsidence but the truth is, it’s the place where demons come onto the Earth and cause devastation with their fiery clothes and weapons.
And here they come, looking for Satan, their master whom God has taken away from his hot home with no running water.
As Dora got out of the car, she saw her shoes were full of water.Why even the car was flooded despite  being in a high level car park
Don’t buy anything from a stranger on the beach again, she begged Alf.
We don’t know what we are unleashing.I wish we had gone on the cliffs to Weybourne rather than that old pier
Well,I had no idea such a delightful old man  might be in league with the Devil.Though when we see what is happening in  the  world it seems evil is much more sophisticated than  it was when  Fire and Brimstone were the punishment for murdering your wife with wilful intent.Maybe Satan  was not so evil, just too proud to apologise.
The Mayor of Cromer was on the pier looking at the cracks in the concrete,
Has a bomb gone off, she cried?
Well, not exactly……  there’s a funny story about that Satan has been calling on us and someone tried to drown him,
Who could drown Satan? He is not human.He has no lungs.
My goodness, how intelligent the people of Cromer seem to be.Maybe we should  get them to run the whole country!
Stan and Emile were standing by the Ouse Crossing watching the  swans and sea birds when suddenly Satan  emerged from the swollen water
How did you  get here,Stan enquired tactlessly?  I thought we had seen the last of you.
Satan  looked very upset.
Help me, let me get into the mirror.My servants are looking for me but I don’t want to go with them.I am fed  up with Hell and sin and evil
Emile had a bright idea,
Look there are mirrors on the car.
Stan was not eager to let Satan  hide there but the wicked creature leapt in and cried with relief after taking a nice white hanky out of his hat
I  never thought Satan would weep,Stan murmured unkindly.
God has almost gone and  the order of the  Western world is collapsing.Everything is upside down.
Emile ran into the car and nuzzled against Stan’s old tweed jacket.
I’m frightened,dad, he muttered sheepishly.
So am I said Stan as he looked into the mirror before backing out and hitting an invisible stone wall which had not been there moments ago.
Now,Satan, step to one side  or we will never get home to Knittingham if the mirror is not freed
Satan obeyed,He has fallen in love with Stan and Emile.He wants to live in this quiet city forever.But what will Mary say if Stan tells her Satan is  on her dressing table in the mirror?
Will Stan be sent to see a psychiatrist? Will he be diagnosed with paranoid dementia  and double pneumonia of the mind?
Or will he manage to get Mary to see things his way? Will she see Satan when Stan is out?
We will wait and see.

http://www.sojust.net/poetry.html

Color, Cast, Denomination
by Emily Dickinson
1864

Color — Caste — Denomination —
These — are Time’s Affair —
Death’s diviner Classifying
Does not know they are —

As in sleep — All Hue forgotten —
Tenets — put behind —
Death’s large — Democratic fingers
Rub away the Brand —

If Circassian — He is careless —
If He put away
Chrysalis of Blonde — or Umber —
Equal Butterfly —

They emerge from His Obscuring —
What Death — knows so well —
Our minuter intuitions —
Deem unplausible —

What I never thought I’d have
Revealed by wearing  M.S tops
A cleavage

Now modest dressing is in vogue
I’ll fear no  more exposure now
In dotage

I never try on clothes I  buy
But usually  I just get by
Unravaged

As I was thin as a birch tree
I never learned to watch my self
In mirrors

About the fall, I never knew the cost
Nor where the people went when they were lost
The group survived by building their own God
With his words,  they worshipped as they  left
He was given to serving them with texts
Written into rocks and sand they trod
About the Fall.

In early days God was a Father  proud
Given to punishment,even death allowed
A goat was killed and they each saw the blood
Reminding them ,the mortal, how we’re pruned
Like bonsai trees, the size and shape  are wound
God could do such things,it seems he did
It was in Fall

Supernatural,  fierce and finely tuned
Yet the sins of human beings ever loomed
Until his own son hung from unblessed wood
The curse of Cain.Bathsheba understood
In her mind she saw how evil’s good
The devil riding bareback was her groom
Teaching her the spells of whip and womb
It was the Fall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater

The beginning:

“Cartesian theater” is a derisive term coined by philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett to refer pointedly to a defining aspect of what he calls Cartesian materialism, which he considers to be the often unacknowledged remnants of Cartesian dualism in modern materialist theories of the mind.

Overview

Descartes originally claimed that consciousness requires an immaterial soul, which interacts with the body via the pineal gland of the brain. Dennett says that, when the dualism is removed, what remains of Descartes’ original model amounts to imagining a tiny theater in the brain where a homunculus (small person), now physical, performs the task of observing all the sensory data projected on a screen at a particular instant, making the decisions and sending out commands (cf. the homunculus argument).

The term “Cartesian theater” was brought up in the context of the multiple drafts model that Dennett posits in Consciousness Explained (1991):

Cartesian materialism is the view that there is a crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain, marking a place where the order of arrival equals the order of “presentation” in experience because what happens there is what you are conscious of. … Many theorists would insist that they have explicitly rejected such an obviously bad idea. But … the persuasive imagery of the Cartesian Theater keeps coming back to haunt us—laypeople and scientists alike—even after its ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized.

— Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained [p.107, original emphasis.]^[1]

See also

• Circular reasoning