Why does the one I want not love me too?
The order of this world does not console
Why does the one I want give me the blues?
God and Nature don’t leave me a clue
Why do we think God still has a role?
Why does the one I love not love me too?
He makes me feel like mental Asian flu
Viruses killed Grandad , Daddy’s cold.
Why does the one I love give me the blues?
I opened up my mouth and said,it’s you
You are more than thoughtless, came my growl
Why does the one I love not love me too?
He said,I do not hate you but it’s true
I don’t know who I am, that fairy, tale
Why does the one I love give me no clues?
If you hate me I shall go to Hell
They used to say that Satan told good tales
Why does the one I hate. not hate me too?
Why does the one my heart loves make me blue?
Elena,a baby wrapped in woollen clothes.
On the last train,Warsaw to Moscow,
[ change Niegoreloje.]
1939.Father,mother,brother
You passed through the Arctic Wastes of life.
Still as if travelling on a train
To an impossibly far destination.
As you left the German Army crashed into Poland
Lost,your aunts
Your cousins.
Your culture.
How does God select the damned?
You had your own baby,here in England,
Not lost like all those others.
Your father died by his own hand,
The hand of history;
The fingers twitching,
Not sure where to point.
Then settling into frozen grief
A sculpture only your mother saw.
You saw too,Elena.
You always saw,though you can’t remember;
The long journey, your mother’s breast,
Your father’s silence.
Only the dead know that silence.
Only the dead weep
With the rocks and stones .
And the ice in each eye
Fell like snow down your cheeks
As you held your own infant.
Warsaw to Moscow,
Moscow to Jerusalem.
Always journeying
Looking for what they can never find:
The home they left behind
The presence of the dead
Lying in gaunt heaps
Like rubbish
Your aunts, Elena.
Your cousins.
You never knew them.
But there’s a hole in your mind
Through which the Polish wind forever blows
Mary was reading a very interesting blog called London postcode by postcode They had reached London N9 and she had got rather bogged down there even though she had not fallen into the Marshes around the River Lea where once the Danes had sailed as Invaders. They would find it very hard to invade us now as the River Lea seems to have shrunk
So lyrical, there are parks and green space,s dirt and mud. Wright’s flour Mill in Ponders End and possibly a lot of illegal immigrants eating Canada geese according to folk myth and racist’ ideas.Canada goose do tend to breed rather excessively and anyway, why are they here in Britain without visas
Mary discovered that her favourite poets John Keats had been apprenticed to a doctor in Edmonton and here is the house where he stayed.There is also a house where Charles and Mary Lamb lived for many years; they are buried in the church graveyard nearby.The church is 15th century and is rather beautiful. there was a hero from World War II who lives in one of these quiet streets in a white painted suburban house.
His name was Charles Coward and he managed to rescue 400 Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz ;his name is on a memorial in Israel. there’s even a film about him with Dirk Bogarde it is called “The password is courage”
in this quiet little Street he lived for many years until he died at the age of 71
We never know who might have been living in our street or the next street. people who had done a very courageous things but had never boasted about them
Mary was so busy trying to read this blog and put away the groceries from Morrisons not to mention other household tasks that the day seemed to go by very quickly
How alluring Mary was looking in her pale turquoise and grey wool skirt topped by a turquoise roll neck top from Lands End and with that a rather shrunken jumper in cream with brown dots on it whether it was an accident or deliberate we will never know.On her elegant slim legs she wore some warm black tights and cream shoes
Mary was dressed up like this at home yet went out on Saturday evening wearing an old motheaten jumpe to meet some of the wealthy and members of our parish ;what’s the total mystery is this:did Mary want to look poor and downtrodden or was she was trying to signal her unavailability to be the wife of any men at the meeting only Mary knows. As a matter of fact even Mary doesn’t know. this is why life is so hard because we don’t know how our own motivations
Mary has spent several hours looking for a SIM card for a mobile phone which she never used and did not need and yet could not stop looking for it; however during this process she found that her gnt spray for Atypical Angina was 6 months out of date. so she had to ring the surgery and speak to the doctor Who quickly emailed the note to the pharmacist telling them that this was an emergency that Mary must have the spray as soon as possible or she might have a heart attack .Why Mary might even die like Jesus Christ, not for the same reasons as Jesus Christ and he was probably too young to have got this migraine of the heart as the most poetic language might name it
Mary herself had never known that she had it until one morning she had a terrible pain in her chest and was unable to speak.then she was whizzed off to the hospital to have all sorts of tests and her heart was totally alright except for this symptom which stops the blood from flowing into the heart
Mary went into the kitchen and took some things out of the washing machine wondering where God meant us to dry our washing in winter
When human beings were first created they did not need to wear clothes because they lived in the Garden of Eden surrounded by fruit trees and flowers. it was only after they fell into sin by eating a tomato that they became aware that they were naked and decided to knit themselves jumpers and trousers
Did you know it can be a long time before we learn to knit or, as needles had not yet been invented [come to that neither had wool]. Of course they did not have polyester or nylon or plastic. they did not have gas central heating. yes they were very happy bearing their beautiful family and eventually killing each other when they were not busy procreating .So the world has continued right up till now .We still knit jumpers and sometimes we kill other people because they do not worship the same God that we worship nor do they have as much money as we do. and whatever they have so others will try to take it away.Just like our own Empire of the Done
Mary concluded there has never been any peaceful time in human history and those who try to be too humble or too good or too kind will be the first ones to be slaughtered. Virtue may not always be its own reward .
if only we were descended from the apes, not the chimpanzees everything could be totally different but what is the point of that kind of thinking?
Mary brooded philosophically while washing the kitchen floor where she has spilt single cream. Mary very rarely eats cream and already she has wasted half of the Carton.
Emile came in: Mother why did you not let me lick the cream from the floor?
You might get food poisoning she cried happily you can have some of the cream from the carton on a saucer for your tea. is that good ?
Well said Emile I suppose there’s nothing else now since you have washed the floor but you know that we prefer to eat things from the floor .Cats don’t have China and cutlery
Neither did Adam and Eve Mary screamed softly
Mother ,control yourself anybody would think that you were a chimpanzee, Emile winked at her!
And they’d be right Mary thought to herself I am a chimpanzee and so are all of us humans beings
I apologise for the errors in this document I am using speech to typing on Google Documents I have tried to edit it but I may have missed some mistakes.It reads as if I need lessons for people whose first language is no tEnglish
Have you got a job yet?
I’ve got paranoid schizophrenia?
Is that a job?
It’s a way of life
But what do you live on?
The earth
You don’t sound mad to me
Why what does mad sound like?
You are so clever
Yeah, that’s why I got schizophrenia.I can see through it all,
And it’s even hard to spell
Yes panic attacks are for the illiterati
Schizophrenia is a deficiency disease
What, like anaemia?
Yes, thyroiditis can make one go bonkers.
We don’t use that word much
Anyway, boron is good for the mind
Do you mean boring?
Don’t bore into my mind please
But I might get bored
Or gored
Is there a bull in the house?
Only a pot one
Well, do the cows like that?
It’s hard to know.
A pot bull can’t make them pregnant
Maybe a wild bull came in the night
What and made fifty hens pregnant?
Do you mean cows?
I’ve never been to the Isle of Wight
It’s not too late
Will they let us in?
Well, we are British
But are they?
I never thought of that.They must be.They speak English and like boats
So do the refugees
A good point
They might be more English than the English
Well, as we are a mixture it is possible
Do I have more genes than you?
We can’t see them
So how do scientists find out all those things?
Rats
I say, that’s rude
No, they study rats
They must have schizophrenia
But are they paranoid?
They will be after the do the experiments
Why do they do it?
It’s all pretermined by God
He must be stupid.
Or cunning
Is he going to send a flood
He already has.. the media.
Where is the Ark?
We need a prophet.
I know , aye Noah
There’s just the two of us
The click and the clack of the shoes of us
Let us into the Ark
If it’s not double parked
The mind’s door swings, a sentence will emerge
What a friend has told me, what we felt.
Writing beckons, fingers feel the urge
Will it make me feel I’m on the edge
Falling off the track, dragged by its spell?
The mind’s door swings, a sentence will emerge
The bleaker ones I feel inclined to dodge
But they are stronger, fresh from mind’s deep wells
Writing beckons, fingers feel the urge
Writing is not for the disengaged
We do not choose the story we must tell
The mind’s door swings, a sentence will emerge
In dark times the inner mind’s enraged
And anger judders through each little cell
Writing beckons, fingers feel the urge
Who was writing when the Romans fell?
Who was writing in our later hells?
The mind’s door swings, the sentenced deaths occur
Evil runs while goodness is interred
“From 1945 until 1976, this was the home of a man called Charles Clarke (1905-1976) who was known for being a rescuer of Prisoners from Auschwitz.
According to a local newspaper report dated 21 July 2009 (http://www.enfieldindependent.co.uk/news/4504150.Edmonton_soldier_Charles_Coward_may_finally_be_recognised_by_British_Government/) he was nicknamed the Count of Auschwitz for rescuing 400 Jews from the Nazi concentration camp. He was a sergeant major in the British army and used his position as a Red Cross liaison officer in charge of escorting Jews to the gas chambers to bribe guards with food and smuggle healthy prisoners out. He also sent coded messages back to the British authorities detailing the numbers of Jews arriving at the camps and the moves of the German military, and was a prosecution witness at the Nuremberg Trials.
And this was the modest house he settled in after the war. The blue plaque was put up in 2003 according to the English heritage site.”
When Mary came out of the ‘chiropody clinic, she walked round the corner to the new cafe where she ate a piece of cake and had a cup of tea .The cafe was almost empty and the waitress seemed delighted to see her ;she sat gazing at the old Tudor wall across the road. The cake was delicious, indeed it was sinful to a normal person and deadly to a diabetic.
After drinking her tea she went into the Polish shop to buy some of their wonderful bread. The only problem with their food was that all the labels were in Polish and Mary decided that she had enough to do without learning Polish
As she approached the till by the door, a young woman seemed to be having some trouble with her groceries. She looked in her purse, she looked at the assistant she seemed to be trying to remove some other groceries but could not make up her mind which to keep and which to leave behind ; she took a credit card out of her bag but it was not accepted
Mary realised that this young woman could not actually afford to buy the food that she needed and Mary’s arthritis was very bad. Selfishly, she asked the young lady if she could not pay for her food.
No I can’t ,said the lady anxiously
And do you have some children at home Mary asked her ? Yes the lady said
Mary turn to the shop assistant and said “I will pay for this lady’s food and for my loaf. then she turned to the woman and said to her
“You can give this money to the poor at Christmas” thinking to herself that it would not seem so rude to pay the bills and assume that the young woman would do nothing in return
Isabelle, as this Polish lady liked to call herself, was amazed by this old English lady with excessively short hair standing on end like the head the toothbrush What ,you are paying for my food ?
Definitely said Mary thinking to herself that she had just spent 5 pounds in the cafe when she didn’t really need a piece of chocolate cake
Suddenly Isabelle came to Mary and asked her her name ;she hugged her closely and whispered I will pray for you as she kissed Mary’s cheek
Thank you so much, said Mary. She gave the shopkeeper a note then she took the bread and walked up the road past the shop selling baths and lavatories in amazing beautiful white china;there were lots of school boys standing in groups chatting and laughing
I’m glad you’re all having a good time, Mary said to them with a smile
I don’t think I’m going to tell Annie about this, she thought to herself ;she might think I’m stupid for paying somebody else’s bill but isn’t it nice to think that we can do these actions purely because we are suffering from arthritis and can’t stand in a queue
So it looks like illness does have certain benefits like making us more generous to other people
At the bus stop a crowd of wet and damp people were waiting and unfortunately it was quite dark as well
I wonder if I will be able to get on the bus, thought Mary. she stood there in her light teal coloured woolen winter coat from Lands End in the sale last year with a pink fleece hat meant to protect her from the rain and at the same time to completely ruin her hairstyle
On her face she was wearing a moisturiser which was also a sun screen and on her full lips she wore coral coloured lipstick from Reverend Makeup for ex Christians made with holy water blessed by the Bishop Bath and Wells. in the West of England as it ran down the road
Her mascara was said to be waterproof but eating the chocolate cake in the cafe had made her weep with joy so her mascara had run down her face making her look like a zebra in human form
Fortunately, Mary did not know about this and she stood at the bus stop or rather sat at the bus stop on a horrible plastic seat. Imagine how bl she looked…… rather peculiar but then Mary always has looeds peculiar even when she was a young woman with golden hair that ran down her back in ripples like waves breaking on the seashore except that they did not make any sound as they waved in the Breeze and had no deep melancholy roar,as Mattthew Arnold might have written
It is quite true that the sea of faith seems to have disappeared but maybe there is a pool of faith somewhere were some goldfish might be Baptised By the parish priest now that the number of people going to church had declined dramatically.Sexual misbehaviour and even rape had destroyed a lot of young people who had trusted the priests and so never were able to enjoy a normal sex life with a chosen partner
No doubt many people do not have much love and sexual pleasure and they may be too shy to approach anyone .Why is life so hard? Some people have luck and others have terror and hunger,even torture The bus drove up the road in the dark with a neon Street light flashing in a horrible manner; she did not like that colour and wondered if anyone might want to change it to something like silvery gold especially at Christmas time
When Mary got home she rang her old school friend Margaret.
Margaret, I am so selfish I paid a woman’s bill so I wouldn’t have to stand behind her waiting to pay or to come out of the shop without any bread at all
That’s a funny way of looking at it said Margaret it was very nice that you suggested that she give the money to charity at Christ.mas because then it’s being passed along from one person to another to the benefit of everybody
You are so clever, Margaret. I wonder what Annie will think. I wonder what Emile will think also being a cat he is not very expert at dealing with money or shopping ;he thinks that we should go out and kill something that we found in somebody’s in back gardens and then we can eat it raw and so we won’t have any washing up. If ever there was something other than snails and worms in Mary’s back garden maybe she would have taken the cat’s advice What would I eat Mary thought.. a fox, a hedgehog, a lion, a dog ? I’m afraid I could only eat the leaves off the forsythia and maybe some holly berries since it’s Christmas I don’t think that will be easy to digest. not much protein in that. Maybe I’ll eat Emile and then we’ll see what he thinks!
I think I might be getting dementia she thought to herself.
I’d better go to McDonald’s and have a cheeseburger and a large portion of chips followed by a large tub of ice cream I’m sure that’s better than eating things in the garden. I wondered Annie would like to come to McDonald’s? it will be a change from the kind of food we normally eat like roast beef and Yorkshire puddings or lamb chops on a bed of onions and tomato. Topside with green peas or Lancashire Hotpot yum yum I wonder if they sell steak kidney pudding anywhere in a restaurant?
When Mary hung up she was so tired she fell asleep on the sofa and when she woke up it was late; she had some Weetabix protein and went to bed where Emile was already lying trying to warm it up for her and to save her money from using the electric blanket too much
Emile is a very thoughtful cat ;perhaps he would like to go to McDonald’s as well in Mary’s handbag.
I shall ask him in the morning she thought and then she dreamt about the bottom of the ocean and all the beautiful fish that swim ; she saw Stan trying to explain social statistics to a mermaid.
What a terrifying sight. So that’s where he is, she cried not in heaven with Jesus .l I think Jesus would understand that some old men still love women even after they have died and any women around might be mermaids who have been living in the sea of faith for 2000 years and will be living there much longer we all hope
When the black cat hit the kitchen door
She was frightened I would be annoyed
I don't know where she comes from, what allures
A cat so rare she can't play with tomboys
I bought her catnip mice and jellied eels
She sniffed around the eels with her fine nose
She circled well, as if she were on wheels
I wish she'd stay all night and warm my toes
She seems afraid but hard frost brought her in
We have a cat flap where she comes and goes
She seems to feel existence is a sin
As if she has received too many blows
Be kind to all the cats that live with you
For otherwise they brew tea in your shoe
Half rhyme is one of the major poetic devices. It is also called an “imperfect rhyme,” “slant rhyme,” “near rhyme,” or “oblique rhyme.” It can be defined as a rhyme in which the stressed syllables of ending consonants match, however the preceding vowel sounds do not match.
For instance, in words such as “shape” and “keep” the consonance is very strong. The final consonant sounds remain similar, but the ending vowel sounds are different in half rhyme. Similar to these two words “moon” and “run,” and in the words “hold” and “bald,” the ending consonant sounds are similar, whereas vowel sounds are different.
It is generally used to give an inharmonious feeling in a rhyme scheme. Poets can bring variations in their choice of words by using half rhymes. It is also known as an imperfect, near, off, or sprung rhyme. Half rhyme is exclusively used as a poetic device
in the warm ocean
we frolic in
the sea of love,
our bodies turning
and turning
around an invisible centre.
skin touches skin
gently like rose petals touch.
how do we speak
except by gestures
of the heart?
how do we know
except by loving touch?
The sea, infinite sea.
trusting the depths
giving ourselves away
with hands reaching
to touch again and again
Our medium is fluid,
no boundaries ,no edges,
washed here and there,
we paint our love
into being
our fingers the brush,
our skin the canvas.
such impressions we make.
such laughter creating
Too old for cold,I stand, now ,against the hedge,
Watching the snowflakes in the glare of neon street lights.
Darkness has come early,and I think of country uplands and huddled sheep.
On Salisbury Plain,shepherds watched their flocks
Just as in Bethlehem two thousand years before,
And then,exactly when?
“Between the wars”,it stopped. Now we know there is no “Between the wars”.
And who decided
To cull the sheep and shepherds and the space for kindness ?
Now that same Plain still exists,but banned
And closed to human-kind,
For bombs ,not wombs
Nor for birth of lamb ,nor gypsy child ,nor Saviour
Where would He go today