Month: February 2023

Metamorphosis by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst review – books as therapy

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/17/metamorphosis-by-robert-douglas-fairhurst-review-books-as-therapy?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Colour

In between the darkness and the bright,

Graded shades of grey and lilac lie.

These variegated colours give delight.

And from my soul, I hear a gentle sigh.

As we live, we dwell in mysteries;

Must take decisions based on various views.

And unknown memories from our history

Emphasis the old , see not the new.

For true perception, we must humble be.

Not for moral reasons but for sight.

The emptiness lets flood creative seas.

Allows bright rays of loving, guiding light.

We need to know we do not know at all.

And, trembling, hold the doors of vision wide.

So gentle should be judgements when we fail.

Then errors we’ll appreciate, not hide.

We must deal with life unknown, unclear;

Perception is a better guide than fear.

Boris and the army

When Mary got home she tried to find her key but it was nowhere to be seen. Then she remembered that she had another key with her. I must have dropped it in the cab she thought to herself I will ring them up tomorrow, Emile her large black and white cat ran towards her very fast.

You won’t believe this, Mother..

Emile I have told you before I am not your mother.

Why do you take everything so literally, the cat asked her in a manner that reminded her of the French psychoanalyst Jack Le Con.

If I am on the autistic spectrum she said to him, that might explain it.

Well you have to take a test to see if you are on the spectrum

But I have got comfortable with you you and I don’t want you to change your personality just because somebody says that you’re a bit odd.

Don’t tell me somebody has been spreading rumours about me. Who says I am odd ;;it all depends on the definition doesn’t it? I may be odd in some words but surely that’s what makes people interesting if they have a lot of different from almost everybody else you know

Well Jesus was very odd and very old wasn’t he ,because God was his father?

Do you think God was my father said Emile ?

I’ll ask him next time I see him said Mary cruelly.

Are you going to see God, can I come with you?

Let me put the kettle on and make some tea and then I will have to get some food out for the supper. Do you fancy some sardines from a tin?

Well I won’t say no to a sardine wherever it’s come from I know that God would never put them into tins

Next time I go to church I will start laughing because they are talking to God as if he is a being from another planet but I will be imagining him on top of a mountain putting a sardines into tins although being on top of a mountain it will be quite difficult to find sardines.

Nothing is difficult for God but he doesn’t sound very practical :I expect some angels would put the sardines in to tins he asked them to do that

Here you are said Mary and she put a saucer of sardines in front of the cat while she 🦐heated up a tin of chicken curry from Waitrose,

Around the kitchen she looked with sorrow because if Stan wete alive he would never have usedu a tin of curry for her dinner. Why am I so bad at cooking? I suppose I’ve never spent enough time doing it and also when you live by yourself it take the way the incentive

The Amazon assistant switched on the radio and they heard the end of the news.

Boris Johnson has an army and they are marching on London from Framlingham Castle because they can’t suffer the Home Secretary any more. When she compared asylum-seekers to insects even Boris Johnson was shocked. And Boris is a very rich man now so soon he will be the King.

Oh that will be very exciting. I believe

I think we’ve had enough excitement here since the referendum what we all want is so hot cocoa and an early night. I hope it’s not too late for that.

But will the citizens of London be able to sleep knowing that Boris Johnson is leading an army from Suffolk although if he meets beautiful women on the way he might take longer to get here. Let’s hope hes not fathering any more children. London is overcrowded already.

Give me power

Now it’s dark and I’m in my room

I’ll put a chair behind the door

I hope that no one knocks too soon

I won’t answer there’s no law

I feel the world intrudes too much.

Im lying on the floor, I’m flat

My very being has been crushed

Folded up like a torn old map.

Please don’t kill me with your love

I may be old but I still have power

From him below and him above

The tower of song was never better.

May I sing until my end.

Until the moon of silver bends

Now there is no vertical

When you struck me,I vibrated like a kettle drum,
then as smaller percussions and repercussions
echoing from all the glassy surfaces
creating a balletic geometry of sound tracks
in space and time.

When you knocked me down,
I fell against her and her and her;
we were like a row of skittles
and we all went down with the lifeboat;
The infinite chain of being is.

When you hit me,the Fall spread across the world
Now there is no Vertical
All is undivine and graceless.
By the Rod it’s ruled

When you left me,I left myself,the world,the rocks,dry land
I weighed down sank to the ocean bed
with coral eyes
gazing.

When you struck my mind
I became an instrument of a foreign power
Singing a song I didn’t know.

When the glass was smashed
the splinters flew into all our hearts.
You didn’t know what we couldn’t see.

I lay on barren ground and gave birth
To my own Creator in the desert

From the bitter winter of the heart






We  feel the bitter winter of the heart
The icy hand ,the cruel teeth’s sharp bite
When close friends die, when lovers break apart

Terse,cruel words can make our deep self smart
The weak have  little power to make things right
So feel the bitterest winter of their hearts

Humans may like fruit be much too tart
Thus fantasied revenge  can  blind with light
As close friends die or false lovers depart

While we suffer, we seek maps and charts
Which path to  follow,which leads us aright
From  the bitter winter of the heart?

The muscles clench, the ligaments are taut
Faces frown, in mirrors demons  shriek
If close friends die or lovers haste to part

The pain of loss, the tears that agitate
The mental functions,all have gone on strike
Stricken in  the  winter of the heart

Retaliation , bitter, wants to fight.
Yet we have little time to see the Light
We   curse the bitter winter of the heart
Instinct, humbler. finds for us new charts

Your face is Map enough for me

Your face is map enough for me,

And if I want to know the rest

Your smile, your frown, your gaze, your glee.

The shape your posture‘s made is best

For showing what your life is now.

A look, a gesture all this show.

Till who you are is then disclosed

And I am in your arms enrobed.

Love vanishes when analysed,

And thinking too

by Love’s despised’

Choose the means to fit the end

And then I’ll be what you intend

Mary is told to play bingo

When Mary awoke, she felt the pain in her ear was worse.
I think must have an ear infection, she said to Annie while she was beating the doormat
on the wall to get the dust out.
Maybe you should stop cleaning and housework.You are releasing lots of dirt into the air
You are right,Mary replied.It’s just what Mother used to do
But did she have a hoover?
No, we had a Ewbank.
Get a cordless cleaner and it will suck the dust out for you
Thanks,Annie.I think I will go to the Urgent Care Centre.I don’t want an abscess in my ear to explode,as it were.
I’m sorry I can’t come but they have restrictions about how many visitors go in
Mary called a cab.Soon she was in the almost empty hospital.How much she would have liked a companion.Still, there is always God, wherever he has moved to.
A young woman with thick frizzy fair hair called her in and said that she was a GP
Mary was thinking how much better her pale lips would look with some lipstick
As for her clothes, it is best to remain silent.I suppose doctors can’t afford to go to M & S nowadays
Mary thought.
There is some wax in your ear, the doctor told Mary in a cruel manner
That’s good.I need a candle,Mary said inventively
Then the maskless doctor stood in front of Mary and peered into her mouth.
Sheaaaàa pushed Mary’s crutch away and announced, there is nothing wrong with you
You must go out and make new connections, do things, go to Dances, play Bingo
Get up and walk, she advised , Jesus remarked in the Gospel l,though he also asked the cripple to take up his bed yet there were no beds left in the hospital
Oh,dear Mary said I am not wired myself as yet.My body is running on sunshine.
Do you think I should offer my supine body to the lonely old men living in the big houses near here?
I’m afraid I shall have to charge them.Do you have any free room with an elecric socket that I might use? And we’ll need a bed
The beds are all full, the doctor replied
Good grief, how many people are in these beds? Do they share?
Don’t ask me.It’s my coffee break, the young lady cried
Mary struggled up and went outside to call a cab
At least it’s been a change of scene yet as the cab drove her home, the pain began to get worse.
Is Mary going to make it?

She was sitting in the cab theb she wondered whether this pain could be a form of angina.

So when she got home she got out her GNT spray and sprayed some underneath her tongue. Very soon the pain had gone completely.

I am so lucky Mary cried. I was reading an article in the Guardian about angina and how it’s been discovered that women experience the pain very differently from men.

Men tend to have the classic symptoms of pain in the chest and down their left arm where is women can have an intense pain in the jaw or the neck and now it appears in the ear.

Atmosphere I dream

The earth became my body for a time

Curving fields and meadows stretched out bare

It seemed that I myself was stretched out there

How to capture how I felt with rhyme?

The train came out of Manchester and sped

Through the darkest miles of mills and mines

Blackened men came scraggling through my mind

I think I see my grandad long time dead

After 20 minutes come the fields

Hunched back trees, I see them from the train

The wonder of that vision still remains

The beauty of my Lancashire revealed

In our human minds there is no time

The sights so full of feeling still remain

The History of the Word ‘Poet’

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https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-history-of-the-word-poet#:~:text=The%20word%20poet%2C%20which%20has,he%20gathers%2C%20heaps%20up.%22

O

Can we be too young to feel old?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/style/self-care/covid-pandemic-aging.html

“Older people are more inclined to feel gratitude for what they have experienced and what they have,” Dr. Dychtwald said. “Emotional intelligence rises as we age.”

The other day, with some effort, I laced up my running shoes and went for a jog. But can you really call it a jog when you go 10 blocks before the fire in your lungs makes you pull up heaving? After two years in a computer crouch, moving upright felt odd, unnatural, and I wondered if my decline was irreversible.

Dr. Arbaje,

Loneliness, anxiety, grief — dealing with the mental health impacts of the coronavirus – The Boston Globe

Image by K. copyright

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/21/opinion/loneliness-anxiety-grief-dealing-with-mental-health-impacts-coronavirus/

Opinion | The Modern Asylum – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/opinion/the-modern-asylum.html#:~:text=Patients%20with%20chronic%2C%20severe%20mental,than%20long%2Dterm%20psychiatric%20institutions.

Opinion | The Modern Asylum – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/opinion/the-modern-asylum.html#:~:text=Patients%20with%20chronic%2C%20severe%20mental,than%20long%2Dterm%20psychiatric%20institutions.

Institutionalised

What does it mean when a person is Institutionalised?

According to the dictionary definition – ‘if someone becomes institutionalised, they gradually become less able to think and act independently, because of having lived for a long time under the rules of an institution.

Love and peace

Love and peace
I breath as softly as a little bird
Like the robin in the glade in Arnside Wood
Quick yet calm, who for some food would dare.

The view from Arnside Knot is broad and fair
The atmosphere is pure, we see trains chug
The Estuary of the Kent will never bore

Further South the Lune runs like tapped tears
Morecambe Bay endangers, how it floods
Behind the Pennines rise, the edges fierce

Dent is sacred mobile phones won’t dare
To penetrate the music of its blood
Nor bring their tones to hurt the mad March hare

Hutton Roof , cathedral, how we stared
A gentle hand caressed my heart to good
Meek flowers grew in the cracks as safe,as pure

How my heart expands and I am glad
For mourning heals and I am no more sad
I breath as softly as a little bird
I tiptoe on the path the peace is shared

Sweeter than the love o

Oh,sweeter than the love of man
Posted on February 13, 2020

Inside my mind I dream of

pearls,
Caterpillars,snails with whorls.
I dream contented, all enwrapped;
With reverie and dream I’m lapped.
The inner seas will comfort me,
While gods open my eyes to see

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Oh,sweeter than confectionery
Is my Oxford diction’ry.
The words whirl round then fall to shape
The sentences which my world make.
This furnishing is rich and strange
And magically self arranged.

Oh,sweeter than the love of man
Is reading works of poets long gone;
Feeling deeply their dark tides .
Upon which our boat may glide.
The sea infinite we float upon
Is the same warm sea the ancients swam..

Sweeter still is the spring air
And the blossom spreading fair.
We’ll drown our selves in grassy fields
To the gods of poetry yield.
We’ll rise again and spring up tall
To grow more rich until we fall.

The life of Moses after being encrypted

I’m afraid it does not come out properly so it’s not you it’s me. I will try and fix it later on

Moses was encrypted after Four-Eyes daughter found him in a basket.

So he was completely secure and emoted

down the river Tile then he actually rescued a bull from some Russians and proved to be a highly belligerent man if he was extremely holy so he said.

Later he married Cleopatra and had many children and they decided to seek the promised land. I don’t know where he heard is that but it’s a dream that we all have isn’t it to find the perfect place to live with the perfect spares or partner

At that time  they had no paper or ballpoint pens not even a fountain pens. They used to engrave things onto flat stones but it was very slow progress

Can you imagine students sitting an examination and they had to  engrave their answers on a stone or tablet? Or even if they had a Reed pen and had to paint there I think the mathematics would have been rather difficult but despite that they built a Temple in the time of Solomon

So the only map they had was on a flat stone which was rather heavy to carry about it and so they were lost  for 40 years in the Sign-pie desert. But it gives them plenty of time to increase their families although what they  food was no one really knows unless it was manna.

When they were in the promised land land god sent them a tablet with his 10 nrw rules of Life engraved on it.

It was so heavy that holy Moses memorised the rules and left the the tablet hidden in a burning bush on the side of the mountain

And it has never  been discovered. One day somebody will find it and I will share.

After that Moses people tried to write the Bible using a new invention papyrus. And a pen made from reeds so they  painted the words on. But that did not last as long as an engraving would 

Because of all the work that Moses had to do do he lived to be much older than we would ever be and this was true of the lot of the ancient patriarchs like Noah and Abraham

After that Moses’ people tried to write the Bible using a new invention papyrus. And a pen made from reeds so they  painted the words on. But that did not last as long as an engraving would. Printing had not really invented so they wrote on long throws of Paris and then they roll them up and tie them with thread and that is why the Old Testament as Christians call it was not a book in the conventional sense that we have nowadays.

Because it’s very slow for new things to be discovered like the printing press we should also live very slowly and not rush and try to finishv the life of Mosesthings quickly

Because of all the work that Moses had to do he lived to be much older than we would ever be and this was true of the lot of the ancient patriarchs like Noah and Abraham

And today I shall be nineteen ninety four

In answer to your question I declare
That I must die seems totally bizarre
Yet since you ask which burial I prefer
Cremation seems to be the least unfair

I’d like to hear the sound of Joan of Arc
Jennifer and Leonard sing in parts
And as the Maiden burns up in the pyre
I shall be consumed by controlled fire

I’d like to be more useful while alive
I am not a husband nor a wife
But I might be a friend to those I love
And pray the sun will shine ,below, above

I think I made a Will,but why d’you ask?
Do you think you’ll benefit at last?
I plan to leave it all to Charity
One that gives old folk meringues for tea.

You never phone without your wise advice
About how housework should fulfil my life
But my mind is as good as yours, I find.
I keep it oiled and covered in red wine.

Joan of Arc will be my friend and saint
September Cohen will become my mate
He’ll sing an anthem while I sail away
And give me courage when it hurts to pray.

It’s time to laugh and cry over our lives
As to the young we dictate our archives
Though few people listen the Word
At least we can assure God that we have tried

I wonder why you never rang before
And today I shall be nineteen ninety four
I will ring you when your birthday comes
To ask you if you’d like pickling in rum.

Life is not what’s said but what we heard

Katherine story, Thinkings and poems, villanelle  September 3, 2019 1 Minute

Life is movement life is song and word
We try to capture life in all its forms
Life is wild as tigers,sweet as birds

Life is what we get yet don’t deserve
The birth of infants and the  food of worms
Life is movement life is song and word

Life is not what’s said but what we heard
Grace comes down like leaves as Autumn turns
Life is wild as tigers,small as birds

Like a boiling pot that must be stirred
We need to watch  for only then we learn
Life is movement life is song and word

Love comes to the empty, is not earned
The heart   like Joan of Arc  is made to burn
Life archaic , everlasting curves

Of our empty fantasy we’re shorn
Like the fields of wheat and barley corn
Life is movement life is song and word
Life is a wild melody   lovelorn