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

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

http://www.poetry.org/whatis.htm

Extract

Sound in poetry

Perhaps the most vital element of sound in poetry is rhythm. Often the rhythm of each line is arranged in a particular meter. Different types of meter played key roles in Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry. In the case of free verse, the rhythm of lines is often organized into looser units of cadence.

Poetry in English and other modern European languages often uses rhyme. Rhyme at the end of lines is the basis of a number of common poetic forms, such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of rhyme is not universal. Much modern poetry, for example, avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Furthermore, Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. In fact, rhyme did not enter European poetry at all until the High Middle Ages, when it was adopted from the Arabic language. The Arabs have always used rhymes extensively, most notably in their long, rhyming qasidas. Some classical poetry forms, such as Venpa of the Tamil language, had rigid grammars (to the point that they could be expressed as a context-free grammar), which ensured a rhythm.

Alliteration played a key role in structuring early Germanic and English forms of poetry (called alliterative verse), akin to the role of rhyme in later European poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry and the rhyme schemes of Modern European poetry alike both include meter as a key part of their structure, which determines when the listener expects instances of rhyme or alliteration to occur. In this sense, both alliteration and rhyme, when used in poetic structures, help to emphasise and define a rhythmic pattern. By contrast, the chief device of Biblical poetry in ancient Hebrew was parallelism, a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three; a verse form that lent itself to antiphonal or call- and-response performance.

http://www.minerva.mic.ul.ie/vol7/murdoch.html

“Thus, virtue consists in searching for, seeing and knowing the goodness in others, and not in discovering the permanent truth of abstract values and norms. So, according to Murdoch, the modern philosophers’ focus on human will fails to dismantle selfishness, the central dilemma of moral life, which distorts the moral agent’s perception of others. As Murdoch’s moral psychology locates egoism directly at the image-creating processes of human consciousness, this process must be disrupted: “increasing awareness of the ‘goods’ and the attempt to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing unity and interdependence of the moral world” (1997, 375). Hence, virtue consists partially in the complex movement beyond the self, toward what Murdoch calls “virtuous consciousness,” and partially in the developed capacity for love. While Murdoch believes that virtue is the movement beyond the self, nonetheless life often shows that we constantly look after ourselves, day-dreaming in seeking consolation, for, “We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world” (1977, 369). Such fantasies about ourselves and the world around us, in Murdoch’s judgment, inflate the ego to the point of becoming a world unto itself preventing us from ever achieving the real knowledge of other people.

While Murdoch opposes idle fantasy she elevates creative imagination, for the faculty of imagination and our aesthetic sensibility help us to generate and rehearse possible situations in which the reality and uniqueness of others can be revealed. The disciplined, creative use of attention and imagination, as opposed to fantasy, becomes central to our aesthetic perception of others, disrupting fantasy-beliefs about them resulting in the transformation of consciousness. ¹ Given these considerations, it is not surprising that Murdoch sees unselfishness as an acquired condition through knowledge of the good because, “Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings … In the moral life the enemy is the fat, relentless ego” (1997, 341-342). For Murdoch, the fundamental moral problem is to acquire clarity of vision as the condition of virtuous consciousness. Virtue comes then through a complex process called “unselfing.” ² A shift occurs through knowledge of the good, from focusing on others’ outward conduct to cultivating one’s own inner life of virtuous consciousness, from choice to vision, from will to consciousness, from outward conduct to inward knowledge.”

The future’s fiction and the past is gone
In a flash of fishes’ scales and eyes
False memories   create playlets  we act in

We work too hard ,ignoring love’s kingdom:
The kingfisher, the  heron,  the dove’s sigh
The future’s fiction and the past is gone

Like  Felix  we will go to earth alone
No Jesuit  priest to pray before we die.
False memories  comfort, when the poet’s done

The acts we do when mindful urge love on
Create direction,  for the future pay
The future’s fiction and the past is gone

God may be a fiction to the  dumb
God may be a monster   to defy
Mixed memories   frozen  hard  our ethics stun

The eye may open like the silver sky
We see with wider vision, feel and sigh
The future’s fiction and the past is done
Our memories   create movies  we act in

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20171013-the-people-saving-lost-words

Extract

“Seyfeddinipur has been working with London’s Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library to preserve words that would otherwise be lost. “The doomsday linguistic view is that by the end of this century, in the next 85 years, we will lose 3500 languages – half of the 7000 languages that are spoken today will fall silent,” she says. “We’re losing languages at the same speed at which the world lost its dinosaurs at the fifth mass extinction.” Although it’s a natural process – “people move somewhere, they give up their language and adapt another language, it’s the beauty of language that it’s a social tool,” she argues – it’s now happening at an unprecedented rate. “Because of globalisation and urbanisation and climate change, this process has sped up beyond what we’ve ever seen.”

Going for a song

The newly launched Endangered Poetry Project aims to tackle that loss at another level. “Languages are dying out at an astonishing rate: a language is being lost every two weeks,” says the National Poetry Librarian Chris McCabe. “And each of those languages has a poetic tradition of some sort, whether it’s written or aural – within that poetry will be all the different approaches and styles of writing poetry, as well as everything that poetry can tell us about those people: what they’re interested in; what their concerns are.””

The face that was familiar is no more
Yet in my dreams ,he is alive again
If ,by a chance, his life could be restored
It would affect me like the hidden chord
King David composed and played  for love of God.
Oh, one must die and one must here remain
The face that was familiar is no more.
Yet in my dreams ,he is alive again

My doctor does surgery too
He cut off the lace from my shoe
I said, that’s my trainer
He said, you’re a failure
You can’t tie a knot without glue

But  how can we sleep in our bed
When our shoes to our feet have been wed?
Our feet would be grey
Our nails would decay
It came from the top of his head.

I  think that  a buckle would do
As alternative tye for my shoe
Then we could remove ’em
And wash our denouement
Oh,dear,now  my face has gone blue.

This astounding sketch was done by Katherine.Hope to learn how to draw trees soon

Do my clothes need itoning?
No, they match your face!

Will I wear a hat?
I’ll wait and see.

I’ve not made a Will
You silly willy
I’ll leave you out
Don’t threaten me.
Why not?
I get mad.

Are we going out tonight?
Ask yourself first then if you agree ask me

I am married so this is just a fling
What does ” a fling “mean?
Fling Flong Flang
To a fling
Of a flng
In a fling
What, are you crazy?
How would I know?
Well,I know.
That is  2/6 as you get a discount
Why?
Stupidity
How cruel!
Tell God!
How?
By a prayer
With a  prayer
In a  prayer
On a prayer
Goodness me,
Hello, it’s God,Who are you?
You should say, how are you
You nitwit.I’m God.
You don’t sound  like God
Seem like God
Talk like God
Look like God
Feel like God
I’ll send a Flood
How?
Amazon Prime
My days are numbered
Aleph null
Aleph one
I never knew Alef won
Who is Alef?
He’s a  Hebrew letter
Alpha in Greek,Aleph ib Hebrew
Which was first?
Never mind.
No matter
I matter
We all matter