For my brother,Mike

Mike Flemming

http://www.bbc.co.uk/lancashire/fun_stuff/lists/slang.shtml

Doctor,doctor  ah feel ill
Gizza sken.Ah’ll mek mi will
Mi mate’s  a woofer .not right spov
Yet  he’s gud at mekkin luv
Now ah’m sick n’tired eh life
Mi pain shoots throo mi like a knife
Wi canna have wa fun in bed
Mi  privates  ache  and that’s not gud
Mi bosom’s gradely, all agree
But they can’t feel mi pain like’me
Mi pongers also feel worn out
When am trollied,’ow, they shout
On Xmas Day , all ookin men
Give me only 5 on 10
A canny lass, I can allure
I swear as  bloody life endures
I found  a ten pun on’t floor
Can a woman ask fe’ more?
Mi ”usband  took his kecks right off
Ye should a’ seen ‘is collie dog!
T’ dog jumped up and bit  his balls
But ah’ve just got it out on bail
I used t’ grumble I ‘ad nits
Now I’ve lost’em and mi wits

Never be sad, when things all go bad
The world is obscure, and God is no more

Let mother Nature be your aid
Get pregnant quick in this sweet glade
I will marry you next week
I really find you ace,my sweet

Let your feelings  allrun out
Then get up the  blooming spout

I dropped the teapot in the hall~
Tea made murals on the wall

I don’t decorate no more
The cats don’t like it  nor your whore

I had a mistress very kind
She was an orange with no rind
Filled with juice and squeezy too
Unfortunately she went blue

I forgot to buy your birthday card once more
Maybe I don’t love you,you’re a bore.
If you want to leave me,I am glad
Living with your rules made me go mad

Alas I bought a card but not a stamp
Please don’t kick me in my big round rump

I decided that the cards were  very poor
So  maybe I shall find one by next year

If the first class stamps increase in price
We’ll be living on just  plain old rice

I did not send a card,my dearest love
But I shall send a message via my dove

I saw  a card I liked by the shop door
Then I realised I am  now poor
The card was four pounds fifty, I was stunned
I’ll have  to give up  drinking all this rum

I grow older and alas I am quite bad
I am wicked and you are very sad
I never bought a card or wrote a note
See the beam in your eye, it’s my mote

The earth has its own gravity and grace
Perception will develop as we grow
Gently feel the sacred  in this space

When we live we need to find our place
The process may be long and very slow
The earth has its own gravity and grace

The good and bad both need to be embraced
Grace comes easier to those who’re low.
Understand the sacred in this space

Good and bad make patterns as in lace
And through the gaps, the living waters flow
The earth has its own gravity and grace

Life must grow at its own righeous pace
By our intuition ,we will know.
Maintain the sacred in the earth's own  space

Of the fruits of earth, the living taste.
Admire the flying birds from thrush to crow
The earth has its own gravity and grace
I am grateful to  the sacred and its space

“I’ve often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics. Yehuda Amichai ”
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/yehuda_amichai_536622

From Theresienstadt they came to Windermere
The orphaned children, starved and ill with fear
Brought back to  enter childhood,  Eden’s sphere
I never knew before  they had lived here
Loved lake water lapping at the shore

I climbed up Orrest Head  to see the view
But much was  missing,this I never knew
I saw the natural beauty, no plane flew
From Theresienstadt

We see the children coming from the plane
That is, we see the ones who still remained
Did they visit where they lost their chains?
Might I have seen them  walking in the lanes?
From Theresienstadt

Photo by J.Leeming.Copyright 2018

Mary went into the bookshop and as usual knocked all the books of the table by the door.Emile was in her old Polish leather journalists’ bag.
Oh, mother for God’s sake,why are you so clumsly,  he mewed
Maybe I’ve got dispraxia, she smiled imperviously
At least you’ve not got discalculia,Emile murmured wickedly
I think it is coming on, she pertly responded,I find it so hard to  keep my accounts now.Maybe it’s because I hate dealing with money.
I am sorry I am not a man,said Emile.I could get  job and give you housekeeping money and a dress allowance
That is sweet but I do have enough to manage on, she cried  wilfully
Then they saw Annie coming in the door wearing a yellow blouse and skirt  which had attracted a huge cloud of wasps and bees who believed she was a giant buttercup
Luckily her foundation was  not yellow but deep pink ivory by Guerroad of Paris and Wigan
Her lipstick was called  Red Vice and was made in Southport for Yves de Pourrant
Her eyes were invisible  behind her cyclists’ sunglasses from,Milletts but she had bought contact lenses which made her eyes look like lapis lazula
What are all those bees doing in here, cried the manager
They are with me,said Annie in a nasty tone of voice
Will they not stay outside, he muttered shamefaced
Unfortunately they have not learned English yet, she told him.The Government have stopped English  as a foreign  language lessons for immigrants, you see.
Don’t tell me they are immigrants, he shouted.That is absolutely ridiculous
Well swallows are immigrants, she informed him,
Do you mean the government is paying their rent and buying them all new cars like they do to Romanians?
I didn’t know Romanians got free brand new cars from the  government.They must have got some incriminating photographs of Theresa May eating  trifle with her bare  hands while delivering a rebuke to Boris Manson.Or maybe Boris Manson had done something terrible!
You can say that again, shouted Annie.He’s an ace at doing stupid things.
He went to Eton,Mary told her
What’s that got to do with it,Annie asked her
Well, just recalled when I was teaching at Cloxford there was a youth from  Eton in  the seminar group.He managed to get a third class degree
I bet his parents didn’t know a 22 year old working class girl was teaching him
Well, he didn’t know my age but I could still get half fare on the bus.He looked older than me but his parents were never around.As for being working class I did work very hard  with  that class and all tnhe others got decent seconds,Mary reported.
The manager appeared and threw a bucketful of hot water over Annie and the bees
Eeh,I am in hot water.Ring 999 and get Dave the transvestite paramedic and some towels
But who will dry the bees,asked poor Emile?
God  dries bees who dry themselves.said Mary
In to the shop came Dave running as fast as he could.He knocked  down all the books on the tables.
What’s happened ,he trilled?
It’s the manager.I  think he is dead, Annie said.I hit him with my handbag
I  can resuscitate him,Dave wept.But keep mum about your blow
The manager came to and looked bewildered.I thought I had died and gone to heaven and here I am in  this horrible shop again.
Annie went over and dried herself on his jacket
.Thanks for the free wash, she whispered.Meet me tonight in the  pub
I am a married  man, he told  her
That’s what they all say,Annie said in   her inimitable manner
And so say all of us

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/chen-chen-aziza-barnes-layli-long-soldier/565781/

Extract

The poetry world would hardly seem a likely place for a “race row,” the phrase The Guardian applied in 2011 to a blunt exchange of literary verdicts. The celebrated (and white) critic Helen Vendler had disparaged the celebrated (and black) poet Rita Dove’s selections for the new Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Dove, Vendler wrote, had favored “multicultural inclusiveness” over quality. She’d tried to “shift the balance” by choosing too many minority poets at the expense of better (and better-known) writers. The poems were “mostly short” and “of rather restricted vocabulary,” the presiding keeper of the 20th-century canon judged. Over at the Boston Review, the (also white) critic Marjorie Perloff, the doyenne of American avant-garde poetics, weighed in too. She lamented what she saw as new poets’ reliance on a formulaic kind of lyric already stale by the 1960s and ’70s—a personal memory dressed up with “poeticity,” building to “a profound thought or small epiphany.” Her example: a poem by the acclaimed (also black) poet Natasha Trethewey about her mother’s painful hair-straightening routine.T

Trial and horror

No other  person in the land
Has got a sense of humour
I send you this elastic band
To play with  when you’re gloomier

I send this card to show I care
I love you sweetest when you’r bare
Yet you have got  a wardrobe filled
Not  with lovers   you have killed
No, you have such taste sublime
The nighties  in there are divine

Thank you for the forty years
Making breakfast when you’re bare
Thank you for your saving grace
We’ve got money, undebased.

I love you second to my cat
What will you say  when you read that?

I love men and I love   cats
How to choose? Don’t answer that

Like Jerusalem of gold and age,
With your beauty I’m engaged
Let me worship by your Wall
Facebook lovers are appalled

A sense of humour is a  useful aid
Especially to old lovers in their bed
Their joints arthritic make their union hard
Even with the aid of  pure white lard
The sound of laughter  proves they are not dead.

As they  drink their coffee,whose  the tread
Upon the stair, a footstep can be heard
Let Death come,  accept and be not scared
Play the game until its final card
A sense of humour

All debts honoured, all the bills are paid
So, old folks get meeting, then get laid
Love  the dance and love the swift white bird.
In the sky the swallows  make their curves
Wonder to the end, the final words
The glint of humour

Mary woke up in her bright sunny bedroom stacked high with books and spectacles like Emile dancing in front of her mirror.She looked at her arm where she  had some stitches removed the night before.
Oh.dear.Her arm was bleeding and as she gazed the surgical wound opened up  more and more and some blood ran out,just like Dave, the paramedic  would run into her house, if you get  my point
Picking up the phone she rang her doctor and was told by the receptionist
Why not put some elastoplast on it?
Fortunately Mary was so intelligent and brilliant after her lengthy education  on  deferential equations, she deduced that after a  large biopsy,elastoplast was not sufficient.She phoned  111
Hello NHS here,are you the patient?
Yes,Mary cried,
Where are you ?
I am in bed
After a few more questions the computer told the NHS aide to send Mary to the hospital A  and E within one hour.What a pity she could not ring 999 and get Dave to help her as  it was not an emergency

.She phoned for a minicab  after putting one some clean undies and an old blue dress.
Now Emile,I think you’d better stay here so you can watch out for Annie and tell her where I am
Whatever, the surly cat replied  like a teenage boy asked to get out of bed to go to school when he was happy lying and dreaming of girls and their silky hair and  wondering how soon he could get a real live girlfriend to take to the cinema on the back row.Or better still, undo two buttons on her blouse and kiss her
Here, there is some fresh food,Emile.I should be home soon
The phone rang.
Hello, this is Mischa your cab driver in my green and blue striped car
I am ready,Mary murmured as she locked the door and rushed down the path.
What has happened,asked Mischa
Don’t look,said Mary who had stuck 6 dressings over her wound
When she arrived she was soon seen by  a nurse
She lay down on a nice soft bed while a handsome and serene man applied various sticky things to her arm topped by a big white dressing
Please come back on Saturday, he cried
Why, is there a dance, she enquired saucily?
No, you need to have it checked!
So this is not enough?
I can’t say, he cried
Little did Mary know she was going to spend £100 on minicabs in the following week.
Annie was in the orange and yellow bijou kitchen extension.She was wearing pink  and purple leggings and a black tunic, her face bright as a diamond in Max -Packed-Her long lasting foundation, her lips glowing like Wigan Pier at sunset with her new lipstick which matched Mary’s cupboard doors.
It was called,New Dawn by Pierre Moulin of Rome and Taiwan.She had seen it recommended by the Guardian beauty  editor who was rather a strange looking young lady by  past standards.
Still we all need advice now and then and cosmetics cheer us up for a little while especially when we have just seen Boris Johnson on TV claiming he loves women who look like letter boxes or was it pillar boxes?
Whatever.
Here,Mary,I’ve made some strong tea.How did you  get on? cried Annie in her warm  Knittingham way.
Wonderful,Mary whispered.I saw this awesome male nurse.
Will it heal?
I suppose so, doesn’t everything , Mary said, her view based on total ignorance of surgical wounds and  failed stitching,I think that nurse should have realised  it was too early to remove the stitches as they were near my elbow.They don’t stitch them up again apparently.
While she spoke a few irate bacteria were searching for   a ladder so they could clamber into Mary’s  wound
You’d think they would put steps in. said one bacterium to another
.I think it is cruel to have such a deep hole with not even a rope to climb down.He had been watching rock climbers on the Langdale Pikes who had unknowingly been accompanied by a thousand bacteria and their friends the viruses.
Do stop moaning. said his wife,Annabelle.Let’s just dive in
Mary drank her tea and looked at Annie who was a little pale
I’m sorry to cause worry, she said shyly.I expect I’ll be better by tomorrow
And so hope all of us

Hello,you must be the expert the police send to see if our alarms work
Oh,I am so lonely I am glad you came.I’ll give you a key to save trouble
Would you like to take this jewellery to the Charity Shop?I can’t ride my bike any more so I’d be delighted
Can you make me some tea while you are here.I have got insomnia and the heat makes me feel thirsty
Help yourself but please leave the duvet.I have too much stuff in here
I  have 2 coats downstairs you might like.
I am too old for sex but you might like to hold my handfor a minute
I have to see the shrink tomorrow.Are you real or an hallucination?
My cat is very bad tempered but  her mioawing is not as bad as her bites and scratches.
I am sorry.Are you Welsh or Lithuanian?
My husband is in that box.He’s called Jack.He is dead, actually but we still share the bed.Is that a sin?
I’ve had some odd dreams but this is the worst.Shut the window and go out by the door. like normal people do
I know normal is a word with several meanings I don’t teach unpaid any more.
You want to know what the average is? Not Boris Johnson

Am allocking agen today
That’s killin’ time, as now we say
Ah,shud be agate but oh ah can’t
Work  ‘as gotten ‘ard teh find

Ma mammy’s ill and she’ll soon die
I must wear a suit and tie
Allocking meks me feel ill
Did mother make a legal will?

Am all allooan  up on’t Pike
Rivington is weear folk hike
Am all allooan and ah feel low
Allocking   is touch ‘n go

Where’s mi daddy an’ ‘is pipe
Where’s dad’s jacket,full eh smoke?
I want him back ,mi mam’s alloooan
You  ‘ed wonder at ‘er groans

Where’s mi cat and where’s mi dog
Where’s ower’ handmade fireside rug?
Made ‘eh rags  and hooked through cloth
Eeh,  won’t God be filled with wrath?

God is never all allooan
Never allocks,  he’s a stone
Amno bettin’ ‘eaven exists
That’s why all wa men get pissed

But ah’ve seen Hell ,oh Ama sure?
Nothin’ yooman shall endure.

http://lithub.com/how-art-can-defeat-boredom-and-loneliness/

An extract

http://www.thedialectdictionary.com/view/letter/Lancashire/

Quote

“Humans do not have a basic, fundamental,
pure human nature that is transhistorical and transcultural.
Humans are incomplete and therefore unable to
function adequately unless embedded in a specific cultural
matrix.
Culture “completes” humans by explaining and interpreting
the world, helping them to focus their attention
on or ignore certain aspects of their environment, and
instructing and forbidding them to think and act in certain
ways (Heiddeger, 1962/1977). Culture is not indigenous
clothing that covers the universal human; it infuses
individuals, fundamentally shaping and forming them
and how they conceive of themselves and the world, how
they see others, how they engage in structures of mutual
obligation, and how they make choices in the everyday
world.
The material objects we create, the ideas we hold,
and the actions we take are the consequences or “products”
of the social construction of each particular era.
They are cultural artifacts. However, these artifacts are
not only the expression of an era. They are also the immediate
“stuff” of daily life, and as such they shape and
mold the community’s generalized reality orientation in
subtle and unseen ways. Consequently, they inevitably
reinforce and reproduce the constellations of power”

Philip Cushman

https://99u.adobe.com/articles/6842/99-excuses-for-not-making-ideas-happen

“3. I’M NOT INSPIRED.
Inspiration comes from action, not the other way around. Our friends at Red Lemon Club shared this insightful tidbit from leadership guru John C. Maxwell: “The whole idea of motivation is a trap. Forget motivation. Just do it. Exercise, lose weight, test your blood sugar, or whatever. Do it without motivation. And then, guess what? After you start doing the thing, that’s when the motivation comes and makes it easy for you to keep on doing it.””

Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader’s experience. If it’s a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it’s a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/humorous.html#DhGxIoZ7uJkpjkLP.99

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-parkin/read-ebooks-without-a-kin_b_1357493.html

“Read e-Books in Your Browser

Although some may be averse to reading books on the computer, this is a great option for reading ebooks.

Google’s Internet browser, Chrome, offers apps that you can download for free and access directly from the browser. (Other browsers may also support ebook reading).

Google Play Books and the Nook Reading App are two apps available on Chrome. These apps access e-books and allow you to read them directly in the browser. Readers only need an account with Barnes and Noble or Google to read books using the browser apps. An ereader is not required.

For both apps, simply search the Chrome Web Store for the app and install it. Again, once you’ve downloaded a book, read it in Chrome.

Readers can also access the Kindle Cloud Reader on their browser; it’s a website that syncs with your Amazon account and showcases your ebook library. Because it is a website it works on every browser. You can start using it by visiting https://read.amazon.com/. Readers can “download” Kindle ebooks they’ve purchased and start reading”

There is no absolute way of determining how vigilant we should be.It depends on where we are, as ,say  a battlefield or a buttercup meadow.It will depend on past trauma or disturbances and no doubt on our personality.But on a battlefield or a violent home it is normal to be more vigilant
But maybe we can’t turn if off………

Whitby Abbey steps by Katherine

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319289.php

“This super alertness makes people with hypervigilance feel and act as though there is always a threat around the corner.

Normally, they are not responding to a real threat. Rather, their brain is overanalyzing, and overreacting to, input from their senses.

Hypervigilance can be a symptom of:

• post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• anxiety
• other mental health conditions”

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/nov/cover

An old article but well worth reading

Extract

Our DNA—specifically the 25,000 genes identified by the Human Genome Project—is now widely regarded as the instruction book for the human body. But genes themselves need instructions for what to do, and where and when to do it. A human liver cell contains the same DNA as a brain cell, yet somehow it knows to code only those proteins needed for the functioning of the liver. Those instructions are found not in the letters of the DNA itself but on it, in an array of chemical markers and switches, known collectively as the epigenome, that lie along the length of the double helix. These epigenetic switches and markers in turn help switch on or off the expression of particular genes. Think of the epigenome as a complex software code, capable of inducing the DNA hardware to manufacture an impressive variety of proteins, cell types, and individuals.

I spread my body  like a summer mist
To cover you and hold you with my joy
Recalling days when we were both well kissed
And how our gentle hands were sweet deployed

Eternity is here if we can feel
If we are open to the singing air
In that place our love is much more real
And all the world is smiling and  is fair

The sword of love will run us through and through
The agony of love is also fierce
Yet who would   wish to live untouched and new
No love, no pain,no torment,nothing pierced.

Then  living with  hearts open and reclaimed
Indifference cannot  wrap us in its chains

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/what-binds-us