I feel as older people we may be less worried about what others say or think.But the main reason writing poetry could be easier is we have a bigger vocabulary if we have read interesting books and poetry throughout our lives.I do not know before I have written a poem quite what I am going to say.But the structure provides a limiting frame.Then the first sentence determines much of what can follow.But what can follow also depends on what is inside our own head and also on conversations we have had, things we noticed when out for a walk.These may enter us like the air does, without effort or will.So should the poems we read and the novels and the other books we love.Even Euclid might come in handy… a bit of logic does no harm and geometric shapes can be symbols for more than mathematics, where they are more likely signs in fact [ My mistake!]

There is a sentence often spoke
In jest or repartee:
“See how the cookie crumbles,mate.
Why don’t you have more tea?”

But my cookies don’t crumble
They bend in multi-ways.
Why here are some I made for you
Only yesterday.

You want to know why cookies bend?
Well,mine are made from rubber.
They look impressive on the plate…
As good as any other.

But when you pick one up to start
And press it in your hands
It does not crumble,but just falls
Into a thousand rubber bands.

The guests suffer embarrassment
As they gaze down in dismay.
But the children and the dogs and cats
are happy as they play.

I gave my lover,one cookie
I gave him three or four
But he was never satisfied
Until I gave him more.

Then when I met him later on
He seemed to be in pain…
And claims his doctor told him off
For eating food again.

So now I’m having lessons
In how to bake real fakes.
It’s called the Oxymoron Class
And you should see our cakes.

I made one,I made two,
I made fifty four.
But now the freezer’s full right up
So I can’t make no more.

I want some crumbly cookies,
But mother doesn’t know.
She has gone to heaven above…
Oh,how I miss her dough!

Yes, my husband is a changed man since he died
I have dreamed of him so frequently he hides
One night we knelt down on the kitchen floor
With brillo pads in hand we scrubbed the door

Then we cleaned the oven for two hours
Death has given him such odd new powers
He never speaks nor asks me what to do
Thank the Lord our fireplace has no flue

I see more of him now that he is dead
For every night these dreams live in my head
He does not go to work nor write more books
He goes to Ealing and he wants to cook

Should I buy some ground in the church yard?
I have his ashes standing by the lard
In the fridge the suet waits for me
To make an apple dumpling for our tea

Oh, yes he likes to know what I shall eat
He starved to death,his heart was far too weak
But yet he likes to see me eat and sleep
And have a little cat next to my feet

So far I do not love another man
I shall become pan-sexual if I can
For then I need not worry who to please
I hate to lose myself but like to tease

Should my husband see me in the bed
With another pillow and a head
He might feel unwanted and be sad!
Yet he left me and now I’m feeling mad

Why clean the oven, clean the kitchen sink?
Why change the plugs and make the cat drink ink?
Why have breakfast, why eat bread and jam?
Why cook bacon in the frying pan?

Why go to bed when I shall have to rise?
Why get up when I shall later lie?
Why get washed when dirt comes back again?
Why wash my hair and use a fountain pen?

I wonder why the floor is full of mud
And whether nature gave me enough blood.
Life is so precarious use it well
Before all hear the tolling of the knell

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/browse#page=1&sort_by=recently_added

• My husband has a rubber face,
  He’s from a subspecies of the human race.
  Some men have faces fixed and set
  My husband’s face is not like that
• He imitates our politicians,
  Just like Rory Bremner can.
  Though he has no wig or hair piece,
  He can look like anyone.
• Some nights I waken for I am laughing
  While I am quite sound asleep.
  I am dreaming of his mobile features,
  Contorted to a different shape.He is skilled at telling jokes.
  And he loves a good cartoon.
  If I am feeling flu type blueness
• 
  Hhe can get me up again.
• He has a rather noble visage.
  He gets attention he abhors.
  In the bar on King’s Cross Station—
  I was asked was he a Lord!He’s a Lord of Fun and Humour.
  He’s a Lord at Listening Well.
  He’s unique, but so are you,
  And all creatures that on earth do dwell

Taunt no longer idiots on these isles
For like the Lord they are not English pure
They voted for the stupid and the wild

In appearance, May looks fairly mild
For old men, she has a faint allure
Being the headless sweeper of church aisles

Boris Johnson Turkey has defiled
He cooked his goose in rapeseed oil uncured
As befits the madmen and the wild

Michael Gove’s own head his heart beguiled
What saves him from the deserts of the sewer
Taunt no longer morons on these isles

The NHS is poorer mile by mile
It’s good if you are dying on the wires
Even when it’s suicide to smile

Mrs Thatcher never paid the toll
She wrote a cheque and signed the counterfoil
Taunt no longer MPs on these isles
We chose among the cunning, the most vile.

The freshness of spring air soothes human souls

Except there is a war a Russian start

So our happy feelings can’t take hold

Though late,spring air does soothe our anxious souls

Mr Putin’s mind is very cold.

Nothing but a bomb gives him delight

Soft the sunny air on stricken souls

The freshness of such air soothes human souls

Except, forever lost, old Russians fight

Praise me with your song and I will smile

Praise me with your sentences unveiled

Comfort me with honey and your kiss

Did God create the world to create this?

Praise me through the thoughtfulness of words 

Aid me with the singing of sweet birds

Bring forth  the wild blossom on the trees.

Every creature, every plant takes

 ease

In your arms, enfold me when it’s dark

In your arms I waken to the lark

Pray for me with singing these your songs

In your tender arms I once belonged

Pray for me when I have gone to rest

The worms will not be hungry when I’m blessed

On the River share my boat and guide

The Water’s deep and dangerous on the tide

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/8gdygp/healing-soldiers-with-literature-427

Extract

“Gunners in Sevastopol, Ukraine, had unhinged the gates of hell on a battalion of British troops. On October 25, 1854, cannonballs flattened dozens of men a pop, and warhorses sank to their hocks in the splatter. When the smoke cleared 110 were dead, making the Battle of Balaclava one of the most notorious suicide missions of the Crimean War.

Six weeks after the massacre Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Britain’s poet laureate, hailed the soldiers’ valor in 55 lines of verse and enshrined them in legend. A tragic ballad with a biting sense of futility (“Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die”), “The Charge of the Light Brigade” became the ambivalent banner cry of this and so many subsequent wars of questionable cause. But Rudyard Kipling’s postscript to the poem, “The Last of the Light Brigade,” written years later, went nearly unnoticed. His largely forgotten effort considered the battle’s forgotten survivors, who, “limping and lean and forlorn,” had inherited from their country nothing but shell shock, pained deformity, and crippling unemployment. Though Kipling wrote the essential poem about Crimea, Tennyson wrote the crowd favorite, as the public wants the battle but not the aftermath, like a child loath to clean up its mess.

If the war poet Frederick Foote has a mission, it would be to unite Tennyson’s gift for elegy with Kipling’s sense of debt. His debut collection, Medic Against Bomb, has enjoyed considerable acclaim since its quiet release last fall, receiving the Grayson Books Poetry Prize, earning applause from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Library of Congress, and being named by the Progressive as a best book of the year. An account of Foote’s time as a US Navy doctor in Iraq and Afghanistan, the book is a tonic for the genre. A relic of the sickbay rather than the battlefield, it prefers the guts of war to the glory, lamenting the wounded on both sides with Hippocratic impartiality.

Like Kipling, Foote knows he is here not to eulogize but to heal. And his interest in the intersection of art and war doesn’t end with his poetry collection. After studying humanities at the University of Chicago, Foote trained in neurology at Georgetown and Yale. When he returned from Iraq and Afghanistan he dedicated himself to finding new ways of treating veterans beset with brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. His approach has been auspiciously atypical. With military funding, Foote founded the Epidaurus Project, which researches and advocates the use of holistic medicine throughout the armed forces, and his writing group, the Warrior Poets Project, puts verse at the center of this practice. In other words, his writerly endeavors are inseparable from his pastoral care, devoted as it is to the therapeutic power of art. If his work as a poet focuses on the literature of medicine, his work as a doctor focuses on the medicine of literature.”

He fellhr broke our lamp, a sphere of stone
Made by potters on the Suffolk Coast
The lamp was silent, it was he who groaned

I was not angry, though I may have moaned
I loved our lamps but I loved him the most
He fell so broke our lamp, a sphere of stone

For human time on earth is just a loan
And of it’s wasting, who am I to boast?
The lamp was quiet, the man it was who groaned

Like a candle when the flame is blown
His life force waned, I saw as I was close
He fell so broke our lamp, a sphere of stone

By the following week, his soul had flown
I heard the music of a distant Host
The room was quiet, my love no longer groaned

Of the love of God, I long to boast
Despite that, devils my heart froze
Why go down and break that lamp forlorn
The lamp is silent, now I am alone

Fried Weetabix and assembled eggs with ruses..

Roast buttered bread and milk from gnats

Corncakes and grass seeds with cheese sorcery if desired.

Freaking eggs blended on tortoise.

Grilled bacon burnt to beds.

Your choice of juice please remember that grape juice takes a very long time to make so be sure you restrict consumption

We have orange marmalade : this is not made from Russian oranges. They were sold as red grapefruit. Just think that I could commit it a war crime without even trying. The psychiatrist is coming. It may be an hallucination but sometimes they are better than the real things

Please feel flea to ask for toast and Marmaduke

You do not need to give the waitress tips because she knows everything already.

Please do not admire the women’s figures as mathematics is now viewed as sexual harassment. The geometry of the spheres is secret.

We know that you can get grapefruit marmalade. But we just don’t get it.

English is not my worst language.

If you start please finish before hand.

You can have porridge when you have picked the oats from the shelf at Jiggles. Good night

Is it mental illness to feel down

When we see a hospital destroyed

Little children plunged into the void

Mr Putin smiles more than he frowns

God himself was cruel in the past

Destroyed Gomorrah full of wicked men

He used to be be more active way back then

Is it Satan gloating in the blast?

We can’t believe a war is close at hand

We don’t want to lose our own dear men

Babies with. no fathers cry in vain

Ukraine’s agony to the world expands

Whatever evil humankind may do

The sun will rise and shine on one and all.

Mercy ,grace and love are spread anew

As apples ripen and the sweet birds call.

What is the mystery of the world we know;

That God looks with dispassion on us all?

And what his wondrous virtues are to show

When wolves attack and murder us appalls

Will heaven compensate the refugees

Who starve in camps when money is withheld.

From those who gave us prophets and great seers

We see confusion,fear then ethics felled.

So often we are blind to wider views

And get mere entertainment from the News

Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitic Legacy—500 Years Later

The sexual smile the birth and death of kings,

The Plathian axe, the tree, and how it rings

The horse unsaddled throws  its mistress off

The ending of a life, the voice that scoffs.

Even the saddest man can tell good lies

How a woman’s beauty hurt men’s eyes.

The hint of promise paralysed his smile

The sexual smile the enemy,the child

I’m flattered that you want to marry me

Yet you are very thin and I am large

When we went to bed I’d squash you flat

You are just a Kayak Im a Barge

I always tell the truth however cruel

So I’ll hurt your feelings every day

For truth is beauty to a mind like mine

So leave me now or never go away.

You like to climb up mountains I believe

A woman is a mountain to a man

Hold my hand and give me kisses three.

I think we met before the world began.

Let’s love each other all the ways we know.

I will not marry now,but never go

I used to have a blog on Google blogger probably finishing about 2012. And this is not visible now because I don’t write something anymore but obviously I am a source of danger to the innocent.

But now they have decided I am not. Since nobody is going to see it I don’t know why they bother.

We have re-evaluated the post titled ‘Fifty more  green sexpots please’ is
against community guidelines https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy. Upon 
review, the post has been reinstated.

I can breathe easy now I don’t think that they’re aware of irony or sarcasm or huour or world play.

I assumed that these are people in the USA but would it really harm someone to see the words

50 green sexpots

If this is removed I will know that WordPress has the same kind of regulations and I don’t want to offend anybody or make them lose their faith or corrupt them.

I have discovered how to make a blog which few read

Please don’t read this

I have discovered it but why should I tell you.

Email me with your complete questions and thoughts at

onceoponarhyme@poetsareus.org

or at

shethoughtshewasclever@littledeadriding hood.net

or even at

womenandmen@freehermaphrodites.com22:33

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_(Aristotle)

ReferencesEdit

1. ^ Aristotelis Opera by August Immanuel Bekker (1837).
2. ^ Dukore (1974, 31).
3. ^ Janko (1987, ix).
4. ^ Aristotle Poetics 1447a13 (1987, 1).
5. ^ Battin, M. Pabst (1974). “Aristotle’s Definition of Tragedy in the Poetics”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 33 (2): 155–170. doi:10.2307/429084. ISSN 0021-8529. JSTOR 429084.
6. ^ Carlson (1993, 16).
7. ^ John Moles, ‘Notes on Aristotle, Poetics 13 and 14,’ The Classical Quarterly 1979 Vol. 29, No. 1 1979, pp. 77–94
8. ^ Sheila Murnaghan, “Sucking the Juice without Biting the Rind: Aristotle and Tragic Mimēsis“, New Literary History Autumn 1995 Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 755–773.
9. ^ Garver, Eugene (1994). Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character. p. 3. ISBN 0226284247.
10. ^ Haskins, Ekaterina V. (2004). Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle. pp. 31ff. ISBN 1570035261.
11. ^ Habib, M.A.R. (2005). A History of Literary Criticism and Theory: From Plato to the Present. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 60. ISBN 0-631-23200-1.
12. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Kennedy, George Alexander; Norton, Glyn P. (1999). The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 3. Cambridge University Press. p. 54. ISBN 0521300088.
13. ^ Jump up to:^a b Janko (1987, xx).
14. ^ Watson, Walter (2015-03-23). The Lost Second Book of Aristotle’s “Poetics”. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-27411-9.
15. ^ Janko (1987, xxi).
16. ^ The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon Modern Library (2001) – Poetics. Trans. Ingrid Bywater, pp. 1453–87
17. ^ Silvia Carli, Poetry is more philosophical than history: Aristotle on mimesis and form, The Review of Metaphysics, December 2010, Vol. 64, No. 2 pp. 303–336, esp. pp. 303–304, 312–313.
18. ^ Scott (2018)
19. ^ Halliwell, Stephen (1986). Aristotle’s Poetics. p. 270. ISBN 0226313948.
20. ^ Gregory Michael Sifakis (2001) Aristotle on the function of tragic poetry p. 50
21. ^ Aristotle, Poetics 1448a, English, original Greek
22. ^ Northrop Frye (1957). Anatomy of Criticism.
23. ^ (1449b25-30) Janko (1987, 7). In Butcher’s translation, this passage reads: “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play, in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper catharsis of these emotions.”
24. ^ Scott 2019
25. ^ (1449a10-13) Janko (1987, 6). This text is available online in an older translation, in which the same passage reads: “At any rate it originated in improvisation—both tragedy itself and comedy. The one tragedy came from the prelude to the dithyramb and the other comedy from the prelude to the phallic songs which still survive as institutions in many cities.”
26. ^ Hardison, 81.
27. ^ Ezzaher, Lahcen E. (2013). “Arabic Rhetoric”. In Enos, Theresa (ed.). Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition. pp. 15–16. ISBN 978-1135816063.
28. ^ Ezzaher 2013, p. 15.
29. ^ Minor, Vernon Hyde (2016). Baroque Visual Rhetoric. University of Toronto Press. p. 13. ISBN 978-1442648791.
30. ^ Eco, Umberto (2004). On literature. Harcourt. p. 236. ISBN 9780151008124.
31. ^ Destrée (2016); Scott (2018).

Sources

Mary had ordered all of her groceries but she forgot to put tea on the list So she sent Emile to the corner shop with a note tied to his collar
Please give the bearer your best tea.
Emile went off and managed to get into the shop after some children who were getting sweets with their pocket money or debit cards
He went up to the counter and mewed, Mother has sent you a note.
One of the children laughed
Is your mother a girlfriend of Mr. Kumar?
No, she is not, Emile growled with a loud throbbing voice
Mr. Kumar led Emile behind the counter into his living room and spoke to his wife
She asked Emile to sit down as she went into the kitchen and poured him some tea from her China teapot
.Do you want it on a saucer, she enquired thoughtfully?
Yes, please, said Emile. This is very kind.
He leaped onto the rug and began sipping the Ceylon tea. This makes a change, he murmured.
I didn’t know you could just walk in and get free tea!
After a few minutes, the shop door crashed open and he heard Mary’s voice
Oh, Mr. Kumar, I am so stupid. I sent Emile out to buy some Twinings tea and he has not come home! What shall we do? She started crying and dabbing her eyes with Stan’s hanky.
Come through, he whispered politely. Do not weep, dear. All is well
Mary came in and saw Emile drinking his tea and winking at Mrs. Kumar.
Emile, you stupid cat. I was going crazy worrying.I’ll strangle you!
Is it my fault, he replied. I only gave them that note you sent.
But is it not obvious what I intended? she said plaintively
These days you never know, the cat muttered. I try to be obedient as far as I can.
Mrs. Kumar came out and gave Mary a cup of tea.
Sit down, dear. Worry is so bad for you. Why did you not phone us?
Since it was just a packet of tea I thought Emile could carry it. He is very intelligent normally.
Yes, I am, thought Emile as he looked at Maisie, the Kumar’s lovely cat who was asleep on a chair.
I wonder if I can wake her up, he asked himself.
Does she drink tea?
Would she like to start a family? It’s not too late for me to become a parent.
Maisie opened her eyes
What’s that cat doing here?
I only came for the tea, Emile told her. But you look very beautiful. Shall we meet tonight
I’m washing my fur, she told him with a smile
How about tomorrow?
Have you got a phone?
No, he said, I’ll just caterwaul at dusk and if you are free I’ll be under the red maple tree waiting for you
Good grief thought Mary.
This cat is very cunning. Just one chance and he is making the most of it.
Mr. Kumar gave her some tea and she wandered home in a daze after asking them for a drink on Sunday.
My social life is looking up but there’s no-one who will hug me. If only Emile were bigger!
His legs are too short!I should get a donkey instead

For the honeymoon we enjoyed the marriage bed too much to get off

The menu was homemade bones with gem for afternoon tea. And for dinner it was lamb drops on a bed of tomatoes and scullions.

When we came back to breakfast the next morning they were staring drilled bacon with eggs of the tide. As you can imagine we were very hungry but we could not co- ruminate well.

Co-rumination is quintessential in any marital situation. Please phone me for more information or email me at the following addresses one only per lesson

cellocat@strungup.org

primenumber8@cuboid.rum

marrymother@electricbill.com

If you are still a virgin after a week in this hotel please inform the manager immediately and he will try to recharge. Guests must be married but not necessarily to each other.

Funerals on request

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/30/uk-households-missing-out-on-19bn-a-year-in-unclaimed-welfare-benefits?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other