My art

Alfred found  a bag of food;

Dried shapes drive  this cat  to brood

Alfred used his sharpest claws

He broke the cover with his paws

So now he’s in a mellow mood

Image made from a photograph by Katherine

Your painting arrested me.
There aren´t enough police -people any more.I am  PC, you see.Eyes see.

I mean it stole my attention
So now itś a thief!

I am trying to compliment you
Let me know what is complementary to a man like myself

I mean I not He
Who is He?

I am not sure.
Look,I prefer Aristotelean logic.
Do  stop showing off.I prefer it fuzzy.
Well, your hair needs combing. I see..
How do you spell Aristotelian?
Keep to the spoken word and no worries
But I write letters
Draw them instead.

I am not a magnet,you know
Well, who are your followers?
They are not stuck on to me
Magnetic force is not glue
So the sun is not glued to the sky?
Did you think it was?
Well, we ŕe getting mixed up with gravity
Better to stick to levity
Godś own glue.Don´t hesitate.Be saved now
I am not money!
But you use it!
He who would transient be
Can use a plaster
A plasterer is more handy
With your face I so agree

The chiropodist said she liked my feet.If only we could unscrew them, she could replace mine.
I found  the flu jab  less painful than seeing the government squabble
It´s best to think of what we can still do,not what we can´t
Does reading  about Brexit make one go blind?
The pharmacist said I was the only person willing to obey the  instruction to sit  down for 10 minutes after the jab.Such a rushed life

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2007/02/poetry-and-music/

Beginning:

The great lyric poets of the English language wrote — and, I hope, are still writing — words which have their own melodic quality, cadences which lure composers to add music to them. Shakespeare, Herrick, Blake, Tennyson, Burns, Yeats have been set to music by numerous composers, creating a lasting heritage of English song. A smaller but intriguing category is poetry that is not turned into song but is spoken to music. Grand master of this compositional genre is Jim Parker.

‘I was an orchestral oboe player,’ he says, ‘but I was always wanting to get away from that and do something a bit more creative so I joined the Barrow Poets, as an oboist and possibly to do some arranging. It developed from there when I started composing music specially for them. There were other groups of poets and musicians around, like the Scaffold, Roger McGough’s band, but they were writing songs. We set poems to music but we  didn’t really do songs because none of us could claim to have been a singer.’

In 1974, as a result of this, he was asked to write music for some poems by John Betjeman, to be read by the poet himself. And the fruit of that collaboration was the wonderful Banana Blush. ‘I didn’t think Betjeman could sing,’ remembers Parker, ‘so what I did was to write music that accompanies the words.

The “word laundry” is very busy now:
The  “non involved,”  the children “used as shields”
Creating euphemisms and bloody how!

Certain words we cannot yet allow
Tampax, blood and women who, paid,  yield
The word laundry is very busy now

With a tiger’s cruelty we’re endowed
You should have seen the  rows of ” disappeared”
We’re using euphemisms,it’s bloody you.

Relationships are more than  winning rows
We saw the soldiers lying in the fields
The word laundry is sadly busy now

The sheep and goats will give you bible’s clues
The politicians lied, contempt revealed
We’re using euphemisms and Oh,God, how

In our minds we keep some facts concealed
Yet self  deception greys our days unreal
Your “word laundry” is hyper-busy now:
Creating euphemisms like ” blood is dew.”

 I painted this then altered it with Artweaver software.Looks like a Xmas card 

I feel within me a peace above all earthly dignities, a still and quiet conscience.

Digital art by Katherine using Microsoft Paint

I hate the dark evenings
I hate  buying Xmas presents
I hate getting up in the dark
I hate winter
I hate heavy clothes
There’s nothing on TV tonight
Flu jabs make you ill
If you get a cold, it’s yout own fault
Cream cakes make you diabetic
All cake is bad for you
Why bake when you can buy cake?
Why cook a meal when  you are alone?
I can’t be bothered to invite anyone round
Everyone is selfish.Except me.

http://bostonreview.net/poetry-arts-culture/poetry-changed-world-elaine-scarry

Extract:

“Medieval poems helped to give rise to new civic institutions.

The Iliad is an epic ignited by the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon, and we are more likely to associate dispute with epic poetry or with plays, as in the drama contests of fifth-century Greece. But many other genres of poetry have the debate structure built into them, as we can see by the word “anthem”—derived from “antiphone” or “verse response”—which surfaces in the translations. That an anthem, or hymn of praise, holds disputing voice within it reminds us that there is nothing anti-lyric about this deliberative structure.

Many styles of poetry bring us face to face with acts of deliberation. The eclogue is a dialogue poem about the act of choosing, as in Virgil’s Third and Seventh Eclogues when a judge is asked to choose between the arguments of two shepherds. The word “eclogue” is derived from eklegein, meaning, “to choose.”¹¹ Another example is the tenzone, in which two poets argue “in alternating couplets,” as Urban Holmes describes in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.¹² The tenzone eventually took on other forms, such as the partimen or jeu parti, in which one “poet proposes two hypothetical situations.” One of the positions is then defended by that poet and the other by a second poet, each speaking in three stanzas.¹³ And in his translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova, Mark Musa explains, “The Italian troubadours invented the sonnet form [of the tenzone], still a mode of debate in which the problem is set forth in a proposta inviting a risposta (using the same rhymes) from another poet.”¹⁴

While in the tenzone two distinct sonnets are placed in dispute, an oppositional mental act is also interior to the sonnet itself, particularly in the Petrarchan form with its division into an octave and a sestet. While the volta, or “turn of thought,” is most emphatic in the Petrarchan form, it is also recognizable in Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets¹⁵

I had  Jewish boyfriend who was sweet
Intelligent and charming to behold
He bought me a new watch  but did not speak

We saw  Port Meadow frozen, it looked neat
Yet I suffered greatly from the cold
With my  Jewish boyfriend’s lack of bleats

When he went away, a tear did leak
As if his love was garnished with much gold
He bought me a new watch  but did not speak

I wrung my hands till they developed pleats
I left my food uneaten, it grew mould
Oh cruel  Jewish boyfriend , I felt weak

Mentally deranged I  was dead beat
I am warm and like a man to hold
He left me  that gold watch  but did not speak

Into my wool blanket I then rolled
A sheep  alone without a home or fold
I had that  Jewish boyfriend who was sweet
He left me the gold watch  but did not weep

).

A  melancholic character  to gain
Is hard  if you  dislike sin,dirt and grime
Practising deep sadness with grey hope
We toy with food and wildly,  madly mope
No aid for those who love a gentle rhyme

No interest in the world ,it’s all’s the same
No love for fun nor learning any games
No studying   or learning how to cope
Oh, melancholy

We see too  many people we can blame
For  fog that came down like a sudden crime
As fast in speed as fearful antelopes
While  elephants phlegmatic stand and gawp
My mind is reeling from the knee deep dark
Ah, melancholy

Voices verging on the shrill, too sharp
Sing the works of Handel and of Bach
Reminding us  of Christmas, love and death
The holy lamb of God born without wrath.

Gregorian chant   and Hebrew music share
Simplicity,  enchantment, music bare
If our  minds were locked into that sphere
Could we end the wars and relieve fear?

Opposing the desire for grace and  peace
Savage men  fire guns and never cease
Sinai, Salisbury Plain  now closed to man
Weapons tested  when they should be banned

Yet Jewish people never fought before
Except when called up in  the first world war
Assimilated ,workers, self effaced
Hitler   employed human sacrifice

Torture, murder, terror don’t improve
The minds  of the survivors as they brood
Cannibals ,slave masters, who are we
To  reinterpret human history?

The  end is near, prepare  your soul and heart
The  message of the Christ  from us departs

Sometimes sunshine  makes us feel bereft
Rain and shadowed clouds would suit  our mood
When we are the warp without the weft

As if we are the  pen and no ink’s left
As if we hunger yet there is no food
Sometimes sunshine  makes us feel bereft

Our mind slows down and all we do is drift
Evil thoughts  into the soul intrude
Like we are the warp without the weft

Let the eye and all its muscles rest
With wider focus   we may cease to brood
Sometimes sunshine  makes us feel bereft

Do not try with will power nor it test
Relaxation brings  back knowledge of the good
We take it in  like babies at the breast

We must  not test the will but let it go
Trust the ocean and eternal flow
Sometimes sunshine  makes us feel bereft
Sometimes sunshine brings its golden  gifts

http://www.pij.org/details.php?id=996

Extract:

The importance of communication through poetry to the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.

I’ll go to Sodom, Gomarrah
I’ll get some prayers; rite after death
I went to Confession;it’s smashin’
I wish we could still buy “Indulgences”
Oh,God, be fair to aged present and for get the past
Give me oil for my lamp, keep me burning.No,I am cool again
Is desire a sin ,and for ” whom”?
We should meet others without memory or desire especially in a “brothel”
He asked for a whore  in bed.He’s hard to please.I am his wife.I don’t know where the brothel is.
I am now a ” sinner” having committed more than  11,000 sins  here.They are called posts officially!But we all know about mass deception and wholly disunion.

Did anyone believe that rage expressed
Could benefit the agent  without harm
Did anyone  read Freud and then digest?

Feelings need the heat  of blacksmith’s fires
Held inside until they  find their form
An image  worthy of our true desire

As well as rage, we should mistrust  love too
Be backward in expression till more’s known
Or risk an avalanche of cruelty.

Take care of  others, they are not our fools
From  sacred  conjunction  all humans are grown
We misuse  folk to test our charm and tools

Holding in the  inner fires   our wish
The blackness of the  heart can turn to gold
No contradiction  hides in sacredness

Take  your love and in your arms enfold.
The future of the world is growing cold
We liked to have the choice  for rage and death
Until we found the charred remains of bliss

Continue reading “Lost for words” →

The American Scream is top of “the hitting parade”
America steams
The American Stream
Is Melania American?
Is Barren Trump?
Ronald Grump  is a dictator  or a good actor
I’m not anti-Semitic.I just can’t read the Bible  but then I can’t read anything at all.I never went to school.
My body was there but  not my mind.I just loved picking paperclips off the floor
I’m autistic.Well  at  least that is not a sin like anti-Semitism.
If  anti-semitism is a brain disorder  many children will need special help.
And if Zionism is so wonderful why  don’t the Arabs convert.On the other hand why don’t the Jews decide they are  Arabs then we can have peace at last.
I know what selective  inattention is.Twice recently a bus driver  closed the doors on me.Once they hit me on the head, second time my whole body was trapped unti 3 men helped me out.
I must be invisible to officials and drivers.
Why  do I need to upload drivers onto my computer? And use mice to navigate? I prefer tigers.
I wrote a poem in the coffee shop and  then I thought, why bother to go out?
When you begin to think, life unravels.
Why get washed every day.
Why eat hot meals,  but we never wonder, why have sex because we know we are too old to be desirable by men and we are not all lesbians yet
It’s a pity we don’t have a switch.Like lights do.
Turn me off,oh Lord
I want to hear your chord.
I know you don’t take orders but  can you explain things like murdering children and burning women?
No,I understand
.Metoo#
Amen.

“One cannot discount everything Freud said, however. As a metaphor it is true even if it may not be completely true in fact. It works as a metaphor the same way the life of Christ works even if you are not a Christian. Make a distinction therefore between a literal and a metaphorical truth.”

J G Ballard

Do you have any mice?
For the laptop?
No, it can’t eat

Have you noticed my headphones?
Wow. does it really?

I am mending my lamp
I hope you soon see the Light

Was Mum a virgin?
Yes, until she had sex.

Why was Jesus born to a virgin?
She was  a myth

St Paul  had a fit
What for?
He was  epileptic
That is egging the question
Begging
But questions have no cash
Have you got money?
Two pence
You seem  poor.Yet I like your coat
Beggars can’t be choosers.
It  is a steal
No  it’s wool
I wool if you wool
I won’t