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.