Perspective ,proportion,projection
We need these for our own protection
But sometimes we fail
We are too frail
Can love be obtained via injections?

We  talk to our friends and our foes
Share our insights and our woes
Their point of view
Our thought will renew
We  learn   to  be kind when we’re low

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/humor-and-poetry

Extract:

In 1993, I took a left turn one day out of my MFA program and found myself at the National Poetry Slam in San Francisco. There I discovered several poets who were funny for the sake of being funny. Particularly Hal Sirowitz from New York (“don’t stick your arm out the window, mother said” and Matt Cook from Milwaukee (“it was easy to write the Great American Novel, back when there were only five American novels”) Both poets initially delighted me and confounded me: There are no similes, a voice in my head said. What would Tom Lux (my first teacher) say? the voice continued. Despite my resistance, I believe those poets gave me a kind of permission to explore humor a little more vigorously in my second book, The Forgiveness Parade (1998), for “I thought the word loin and the word lion were the same thing. I thought celibate was a kind of fish”. Perhaps in that book there were places where I was too vigorous in my pursuit: looking back there are a few poems that are just a little too jokey somehow, a little one-dimensional.

I am becoming aware of how some humor can set a roadblock for the poetic speaker, making it impossible for the speaker to get back to a serious place. And how some other (less frequent) uses of humor can leave that door open. I want to leave that door open

Tonight I am watching the Eurovision Song Contest without the sound on
There is a certain decadence about the performances
Like end of the Roman Empire
I can’t understand  how money is wasted  like this
When will Nero play his fiddle?
Still, good to see Northern Macedonia.At least I know where that is!
Maybe  Theresa May might like to Remain there
Or make a quick Exit, forensic?
Boris might like to  Trump all
Be careful what you wish for

The bees   are humming by the garden gate
The  dampness  makes the leaves  more green , more rich
As summer comes too early and too late

The ants upon my rowan tree  had faith
Busily they ran,  as if bewitched
The bees   are humming by the garden gate

The rowan tree has died, leaves not a trace
When it was felled, it left an empty pitch
Come  oh  wild flowers, leave no summer base

I watch  more ants, they seem to have no face
The rain leaves puddles in the empty ditch
The bees    will hover by the garden gate

The ants will help  their wounded  under threat
But having not a doctor, they’re  not stitched
Will summer come before it is too late?

From this world, we must try  not to flinch
When we leave it will be with a wrench
The bees   are humming by the garden gate
As summer comes too early by mistake

The Observer, Observed

“For Winter, Gopnik divides the season into five modes: Romantic, Radical, Recuperative, Recreational, and, finally, Remembering. “Romantic Winter” charts the transition from winter as a brutal, dangerous reality—people can freeze to death, after all—to one we can admire as picturesque and stroll through with pleasure and wonder. Throughout, he reflects upon poems by Samuel Johnson, paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, scientific treatises on snowflakes, and the differing ideas about reason from the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment. “Radical Winter” investigates the obsession with reaching the Arctic and Antarctic poles. “The search for that spatial winter, the search for the poles, has become an obsessive subject for modern people. It’s the model of all exploration for exploration’s sake, exploration undertaken with a minimum of national advantage, a marginal economic purpose, and a maximal amount of adventure taken for adventure’s sake.”

If polar travellers are, as Gopnik puts it, “a kind of ecstatic monk of nature,” Christmas, which he explores in “Recuperative Winter,” is the paradigmatic secularized winter holiday. He uses “Recreational Winter” to briefly review the history of ice skating—ice skating paintings, ice skating poems, including a sublime passage on the subject from Wordsworth’s The Prelude—as well as hockey and his beloved Montreal Canadians”

Do you take this battery operated tin opener to be your lawful wedded mate?
I feel sick
That’s not in the script
I don’t think much of this dream
Just carry on
Yes, alright I’ll marry the  tin opener
In sickness and health
Will it know?
Do you know?
Can’t I marry the fridge instead?
Why?
What’s so special about a tin opener?
It’s possible to put it into your handbag~
With the cake fork I used to comb my hair?
Oh,no.They might get on too well~
Are they magnetically drawn together
Only if you have an induction hob
Where?
In your handbag
Let’s just stop
Why?
I can’t believe it even as a dream.
I’ll try a leopard next time
But not a panther,please.Sylvia Plath has written of that
You are so conceited
Why?
Who is Sylvia?
That’s what we all wonder
Sh might have been better off with a tin opener

We’re living  with the lunatics today
Half the population  burns with rage
Wondering how to edit Theresa May

No longer do the anxious kneel and pray
We hear the verbal missiles wildly  staged
We may be the lunatics today

For this civil war, we all will pay
The British  voters ‘ anger is a plague
Wondering how to  infect Theresa May

Is this a stage and who  has made this Play?
Of the facts we seem to be quite vague
We may be the lunatics today

The stage is set, the tyrant has his say
Who will give the poor a living wage?
Wondering how to   question Theresa May

Shall we too see  immigrants be  caged
They are merely animals despised
We’re living  with the lunatics today
Wondering how to export Johnson,May

A history of the poetry of history

“History and poetry hardly seem obvious bed-fellows – a historian is tasked with discovering the truth about the past, whereas, as Aristotle said, ‘a poet’s job is to describe not what has happened, but the kind of thing that might’. But for the Romans, the connections between them were deep: historia . . . proxima poetis (‘history is closest to the poets’), as Quintilian remarked in the first century AD. What did he mean by that?

From its beginnings, epic poetry in Latin was frequently based on actual historical events – so Naevius’ Bellum Punicum in the third century BC told the story of the first Punic War between Rome and Carthage, whereas the subject of Ennius’ Annales, from the second century BC, was the history of Rome from mythological times down to the poet’s own day. Evidently the Romans had no difficulty with taking a genre used by the Greeks mainly for the retelling of myth and employing it to celebrate their own national past, and indeed present. Even Cicero found the time to write an epic poem (complete with gods) about his own consulship (De Consulatu Suo) – after unsuccessfully attempting to interest some real poets in the job. Barely more than the first line has survived; and that verse, o fortunatam natam me consule Romam, ‘O happy Rome, born when I was consul’, is as inelegant (with its ugly repetition –natam natam) as it is immodest.”

I think I have just failed my IQ test
The apple cart has landed on my chest
I didn’t mean to cause such selfish pain
Writing you a letter once again

I never knew that numbers carried on
To  fall in love and marry they’ve’ begun
Their children are irrational  not whole
Some are transcendental ,I’m  enthralled

The IQ test was far too hard for me
I cannot even read it,don’t you see?
I think they are immoral and in vain
I’ve written to the Queen,I have complained

The apple cart is emptier  today
I ate them all and now I feel quite gay

Install a pocket charger for your brain
Did you  curse the folk who chose Remain?
Wearing out your mind is not allowed
Talking the hind legs off a great crowd

Make a little port between your eyes
Plug the charger in before  you die
Is  the little light now showing green
Good, that shows  the lack can be redeemed

Maybe USB-C is the best
Did you ever pass algebra by text?
These cords have no up and neither down
Charlie Chaplin’s silence will astound

Charge  your brain some rent and do repairs
We’ll follow you on Facebook with our glares

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/margaret-drabble-ageing-literature/

Caressed by light yet not by human hands
Stroked by colour, touched by sun and moon
The  lonely person cannot understand

We want the feel of flesh, the words so kind
Enveloped in our coat of  dogged gloom
Caressed by light yet not by human hands

Fixed on one who  elsewhere is deployed
We fail to notice as  our hate consumes
The  lonely person  will not understand

As our mind with misery is crammed
We do not check the facts,  careering on
Indifferent to the light,  or humankind

Colourless emotions fake our lines
Sharing words and sentences  is doomed
The  lonely person   could well understand

In the darkness of the human mind
Caressed by  none but God, we  lose the tune
The  lonely  feel  dismembered  and then damned 

If we feel despair  and breakdown looms
Will we weed out love and  bring  down ruin
Caressed by light yet not by human hands
The  lonely person wills  that she withstands

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7290/pat-barker-the-art-of-fiction-no-243-pat-barker

BARKER

Well, you see, this is what we have in common with the Bronze Age or World War I. We have these bodies that have actually not evolved during that time, as far as we know. The truth of the body is for me the most important route into the historical past, and into the mythic past as well. You have five senses—well, more than five, at least six because you have this sense of gravity, of where your body is in space—but that’s all you’ve got as a writer. There is literally almost nothing else. The whole thing rests on this incredibly simple foundation.

We voted to leave Europe with a kiss
How the heck has Britain come to this?
Fooled by propaganda from the liars
Educated  under nightmare’s  scheming spires
The beast of racism risen, where is Christ?
I doubt if God will want to save us twice
We think we are superior and wise
Images of Empire have not died
And if  I am Croatian, can’t I  work
Underneath the covers many shirk.
And if I fled from Syria am I damned,
Who was it divided up the land?
France and Britain were  a fine old pair
See the murderous Middle East they  chaired
Breaking Palestine  into two parts
Breaking many humans and their hearts.

I feel like a wet fish  tonight
Do you want a towel?
Why, do you like them?
Who do you mean?
That’s statistics.
Only elementary.
Maybe it is simple to you but not to others
Which others?
Well,I don’t know. People of average intelligence
Mine is so low I am an imbecile
Well, what a surprise
It was to me,I didn’t know before I went to Oxford, fortunately
How on earth did you get in?
I went on the train.
But did they not test you?
I said I’d cry if they rejected me
So what happened?
They asked me to teach some undergraduates
Just like that?
Yes,I was shocked myself but the maths was not so bad
Did you get Teach Yourself Analysis?
I didn’t know you could
Could what?
Teach yourself
Who taught you?
It was like talking,I just picked it up
Well, it’s a  puzzle
Not after you pick it up
Unless it’s a jigsaw puzzle
Well, where is the wet fish?
In the river
What river
The Dee.
Chester is on the Dee
Sto p accusing Chester.
What, is  being on the Dee wrong?
Probably with Boris ruling it will be
What does he know?
Nothing,That is the problem
Mathematics has problems
Not like this.
So one could say it’s easier than living
Well, you can’t so it when you are dead
You can’t live when you are dead
As far as we know.
Do we need a Venn Diagram?
They make me feel faint
That’s lack of food
Is it really? I thought food was just entertainment
How can  you be so stupid?
It is normal for imbeciles
Yet you taught linear algebra
We should have done it elliptically
You telling  me?
Cryptically

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/07/one-word-understand/?utm_source=The+Paris+Review+Newsletter&utm_campaign=48ea9ef95d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_Weekly_12072018_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_35491ea532-48ea9ef95d-55515601&mc_cid=48ea9ef95d&mc_eid=552ffa9eef

“This is where people misstep: they express understanding of a specific, private experience you have not yet been able to sufficiently describe—an experience you yourself may not yet understand. I recall watching an art teacher correct an abstract painting of mine, painting over a section of detailed work with his large, white brush.”