Why not donate to McMillan Cancer Care if you are British?See more photos

http://www.redonline.co.uk/health-self/self/reading-poetry-is-good-for-you

“It reduces feelings of isolation and depression

As readers we take comfort in knowing we are not isolated in our struggles. Somebody has felt this way before! If you’re anxious, melancholy or grieving, the poet’s words mean that you no longer have to feel alone, and poetry can give hope for the future and even some excellent advice. Dorothy Parker’s splendid company at any time, but particularly if you’ve just been dumped.

It can boost your mood

Poetry isn’t just for leaning on during hard times. It’s a thrill to read a poem that encapsulates – more elegantly than we ever could – how it feels to be deliriously happy, or perfectly tranquil, or deeply in love. It’s one of the reasons that sharing poetry is so popular at weddings.

It can take you to the country in the heart of the city

A poem becomes an incantation to transport you from the humdrum daily world, an escape hatch from the commute, the queue and the waiting room. Choose verses about dancing daffodils, dappled things or stopping by woods on a snowy evening to provide yourself with a mental gulp of healthy fresh air, a magical five minute trip to the countryside while you pound the pavements.

It can calm you down

When I find I’m really about to lose my temper, counting to ten is good – but reciting a silly poem is better (out loud, it has the added benefit of getting the attention of tantrum-throwing children, but in your head is probably better for the platform when your train is delayed.) The poems from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland are my go-to for these times. It’s impossible to grit your teeth while mentally running through ‘You are old, Father William’s perky stanzas.

It can say what you can’t

Poems can also say something we might find difficult to, if we can’t find the words to comfort the bereaved, or are too bashful to talk about our affection. Candlestick Press (http://www.candlestickpress.co.uk) publish a range of beautiful pamphlets covering all manner of subjects from kindness and tea through friendship to cycling, which can be sent instead of a disposable greetings card and enjoyed over and over again.”

Photo by Mike Flemming

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Nature_and_Elements_of_Poetry/The_Faculty_Divine:_Passion,_Insight,_Genius,_Faith

“But if Milton had used the word “impassioned,” his meaning would be plainer to the vulgar Passion and Imagination.apprehension. Poetic passion is intensity of emotion. Absolute sincerity banishes artifice, ensures earnest and natural expression; then beauty comes without effort, and the imaginative note is heard. We have the increased stress of breath, the tone, and volume, that sway the listener. You cannot fire his imagination, you cannot rouse your own, in quite cold blood. Profound emotion seems, also, to find the aptest word, the strongest utterance,—not the most voluble or spasmodic,—and to be content with it. Wordsworth speaks of “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” while Mill says that “the poetry of a poet is Feeling itself, using thought only as a means of expression.” The truth is that passion uses the imagination to supply conceptions for its language. On the other hand, the poet, imagining situations and experiences, becomes excited through dwelling on them. But whether passion or imagination be first aroused, they speed together like the wind-sired horses of Achilles.

The mere artisan in verse, however adroit, will do Emotion must be unaffected and ideal.well to keep within his liberties. Sometimes you find one affecting the impassioned tone. It is a dangerous test. His wings usually melt in the heat of the flame he would approach. Passion has a finer art than that of the æsthete with whom beauty is the sole end. Sappho illustrated this, even among the Greeks, with whom art and passion were one. Keats felt that “the excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relations with beauty and truth.” Passion rises above the sensuous, certainly above the merely sensual, or it has no staying power. I heard a wit say of a certain painting that it was “repulsive equally to the artist, the moralist, and the voluptuary.” Even in love there must be something ideal, or it is soon outlawed of art. A few of Swinburne’s early lyrics, usually classed as erotic, with all their rhythmic beauty, are not impassioned. His true genius, his sacred rage, break forth in measures burning with devotion to art, to knowledge, or to liberty. There is more real passion in one of the resonant “Songs before Sunrise” than in all the studiously erotic verse of the period, his own included.”

Mike Flemming copyright

http://home.btconnect.com/mike.flemming/WStarling.htm

To avoid plagiarism. I shall have to use words noone has ever used before.But then nobody would understand me.
OK avoid sentences written by others…. that could be hard too

The bot was culling ,the title sucked
Malware,Macbeth,,malware
Caesar beware the tides on Mars
Who caused Sylvia?
He rewired marriage in Venice

How do I know if someone has written that before?

Her hems looked as if she had studied all of non-Euclidean geometry and wanted us to know it
Her  orange pleated culottes  were unpleated after an hour on the bus
Her velvet trenchcoat would ensure she would lose,  single handed, WW3 before it  even began
Her knicker length denim shorts  and shrunken T shirt made groping  a dreadfully un-PC temptation to the men selling ripe mangoes and pears.And the women too.
Her head was extraordinarily big so  she was  fortunate in having  two large feet and a a yard [with a brick lavatory, once the last word in elegance]
He said her thesis was on Quantum Dramatics and Lunar Division.I don’t believe a word of it
He said , in  general it’s a real nativity.
Her trench-coat had holes  all over for drainage.Suitable for ladies with hot gushes
In bed she wore a velvet sheath and long  loves
If you have cramp. wear a loose  light dress and kippers
She had a T shirt with her IQ printed on the front.In Chinese.Was it wise?Was it fair?
I had one made saying,Je suis le moron de Tel Aviv. I don’t  know any Hebrew.And they don’t know me neither.
Her underwear was absolutely pure silk unfortunately as she suffered from  cystitis and often could not wait.Wear towelling knickers and a big skirt and you will be completely safe from men,bugs and fashionable desires

I took this photo in 2008

Don’t believe him, it’s  just a contincnce trick
She shelled pea shells in the she store
Gather ye coal dust by T.May.
He’s a psychowrath and sociodeath  made into one
That’s not  a man,it’s my husband.
He’s my brother-in-flaw.
Can  I carry my sister?
She was my aunt by barrage
He tells lies as if he was born to tweet.
If he is a liar, I’ll eat my cat
He’s as honest as the ploy  is wrong.
He tried to talk me into his shed.
I don’t know what the Eskimos know
{ that line  occurred to me in a dream, and I was singing it]
If all goes well,I’ll be wool soon
He was my sweetheart for a shower or two
I don’t like delta x.It comes and goes and yet all calculus depends on it.Talk about  quantum dramatics!
Why do x,y, and z stand for the unknown? I’d prefer names like John,Mike and Fred
dJohn/dFred =3 times round the houses at the speed of fright
I never understood physics and I don’t know y.
He was a mutation alright.He had no strings on his violamb
She used to eat cake for its interference and i-songs

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/145594/the-poet-contemplates-the-nature-of-reality

After I had my wisdom tooth out I got a UTI so my brain is a bit off!I hope now I am on antibiotics I shall be able to write again

A gentle growth of fragile spring time plants
Takes our minds off wasps and biting ants
In Nature we can see the cruel and kind
As we do in our own human minds.

The shadow hides behind the perfect form
Soon the flower will wither, all forlorn
Yet shadows give the depth and height to life
The shadow and its form are man and wife

We look for sunny days and pleasures green
To love in meadows and inside our dreams
But winter will descend despite our pleas
As soil and earth desire the cold to grieve

Look at what opposes  love’s desires
Then let your  human heart burn in the Fire.

By my sister copyright

Colours make us think of love and joy
Forgot the hate beneath which may annoy
As we need respite from the strain of life
So a husband needs a   kindly wife

Forget the new age  politics and rights
The PC speech that  our desire will blight
Underneath there is a river deep
Where man and woman live and  love may leap

The old men still remember  with their hearts
The young  may never feel the union  start
For underneath the gossip and the sleaze
Where angels must not  tread,  there   love agrees

Let the silence of the evening sky
Give us sense to live and sense to die

The trees’ roots wind beneath the grass.
Grass so perfect,neatly mown.
In roots entangled,serpents mass
Beneath the fruit trees which now groan.

Another,darker world beneath,
Where the roots  stark homes  do give
To tiny creatures which there seethe,
Where all our darkest shadows live.

From here a serpent  malice took
From our neglect  what we hate.
We see the surface , do  not look
At what lies deeper ,till too late.

And so we live, both deaf and blind
To the depths of our own minds

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol8/pp131-149

How like a prison is a body lame
The mind  calls up desires and feels no shame
But bones and joints all give us  piercing pain
And  who will pay insurance or  take blame?

In my prison,I accept demands
I exercise  and write words out by hand
Encourage heart and  soon  will understand
While down the channel  runs a little sand

I read King Lear and thought the king a  fool
He did not live nor die as monarchs rule
Now I’m stuck inside a structure cruel
I'm the the nail which hides inside the jewel

The body’s more important than the soul
Feeling is the highest art of all

Image from watercolour by  author

He got divorced as he could not bear Lynn
He could not roam
He was such a rotter,damn
Some flew,Hugh trekked
Could you cope in Argon?
He stole Joanna’s berg.
He leads her by the nose.
He was too loose for her.
I envy Enna.
The hamster,damn..
He kept his head in Bury.
And as glass goes, he went.
He’s done Dee already
Don’t tell Aviv.
How about we go Haifa?
I will not love  a man till I can sail  to Gaza   without asking ,Is Raoul in?
Who is Ray ‘ell?
Don’t Bask all night, we can’t leave Kat alone here.
Oh,my pyre knees.
I can’t bear new yolk eggs.
Why not dun caster?
It’s Hull here.

Not tonight,I’ve lost my wisdom tooth
That’s about six you’ve lost since we got engaged.How many jaws have you got?

Not tonight,I feel blue
You look red to me!

Not tonight,I am reading the Bible
Doesn’t it tell you a wife must obey her husband?
Is that rape if you order me about?
It depends on whether you like it
I do like it sometimes
But when?
That’s what I am wondering.

Not tonight,I am writing a poem
A  limerick?
A postmodern mimic’s life
If you’d told me your IQ was 189 I’d never have married you.
But  it’s not 189
That’s what they all say.

Not tonight I am sleeping with the cat
Can I not join in?

Not tonight I have toothache
Where?
My glands swelled so I can’t tell
Surely you can open your mouth?
I’m too fastidious.
Well,can you eat?
I’d love a  piece  of cake.
Can I bribe you?
I doubt it.I am too scrupulous.
I’ll give you a new car
I can’t drive
Why not?
I  like the man to drive.
I see.But  if you won’t open the door he can’t get in
Why, is it  locked?
Probably but I might get lucky
You’re worse than Leonard Cohen.
I didn’t know you slept with him.
Well. it looked like him.
It?
Maybe a daydream.
I could have danced all night but I was marking the algebraic topology exam

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poems-passion-and-sex

“The phrase “carpe diem,” from a quote by Horace, means “seize the day,” and is often used to describe persuasive poetry designed to convince the object of the poet’s desire to make love—for time is short, as the argument goes, and anything might happen. Other arguments range from the existential to the absurd, and poets make their points persistently in an astounding variety of ways, using every metrical and technical device to show off their wit and prowess. Perhaps the most famous example is Robert Herrick’s poem, “To the Virgins, Make Much of Time” where he begins, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” Another famous example is Andrew Marvell’s argument in “To His Coy Mistress,”

Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp’d power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

The form has inspired both imitations and satires. In reply to Christopher Marlowe’s shepherd, who begged his nymph to “Come live with me and be my love,” Sir Walter Raleigh let his nymph knowingly reply:

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

The companion piece to the carpe diem poem might well be the aubade, a form in which the poet begs his lover to stay in bed and mourns the rising of the sun because it means that they must part. John Donne’s poem, “The Sun Rising,” is one of the earliest examples:

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?”

The lamp is still in pieces as I stare
The shade leans  like a cripple, like myself
It shows the place that we should never bare

I may be wrong to let my mind be lured
In thinking to restore this ancient wealth
The lamp is still in pieces as I stare

This lamp is not a lamp as it can’t share
The light it should throw on our human stealth
It shows the loss that I don’t want to  bear

Is love  for ever,  does it need our care?
Or should we rid ourself of what it tells?
The lamp is still in pieces as I stare

I harmed myself by cutting off my hair
What I have to  offer would not sell
I feel the loss that I don’t want to  bear

A female Oedipus, a myth  unfolds
The truth can blind as well as any nail
The lamp is still in pieces as I stare
It shows a place that  is no longer there

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-become-insane?__filter__&__nsrc__=2&__snid3__=2340221550

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/03/25/the-sunk-cost-fallacy/

!The Misconception: You make rational decisions based on the future value of objects, investments and experiences.

The Truth: Your decisions are tainted by the emotional investments you accumulate, and the more you invest in something the harder it becomes to abandon it.”

Extract

” Kahneman says organisms that placed more urgency on avoiding threats than they did on maximizing opportunities were more likely to pass on their genes. So, over time, the prospect of losses has become a more powerful motivator on your behavior than the promise of gains. Whenever possible, you try to avoid losses of any kind, and when comparing losses to gains you don’t treat them equally. The results of his experiments and the results of many others who’ve replicated and expanded on them have teased out a inborn loss aversion ratio. When offered a chance to accept or reject a gamble, most people refuse to make take a bet unless the possible payoff is around double the potential loss.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely adds a fascinating twist to loss aversion in his book, Predictably Irrational. He writes that when factoring the costs of any exchange, you tend to focus more on what you may lose in the bargain than on what you stand to gain. The “pain of paying,” as he puts it, arises whenever you must give up anything you own. The precise amount doesn’t matter at first. You’ll feel the pain no matter what price you must pay, and it will influence your decisions and behaviors.

In one of his experiments, Ariely set up a booth in a well-trafficked area. Passersby could purchase chocolates – Hershey’s Kisses for one penny a piece or Lindt Truffles for fifteen cents each. The majority of people who faced this offer chose the truffles. It was a fine deal considering the quality differences and the normal prices of both items. Ariely then set up another booth with the same two choices but lowered the price by one cent each, thus making the kisses cost nothing and the truffles cost 14 cents each. This time, the vast majority of people selected the kisses instead of the truffles.

If people acted on pure mathematical logic, explained Ariely, there should have been no change in the behavior of the subjects. The price difference was the same. But you don’t think in that way. Your loss aversion system is always vigilant, waiting on standby to keep you from giving up more than you can afford to spare, so you calculate the balance between cost and reward whenever possible. He speculates that this is why you accumulate free tchotchkes you don’t really want or need and why you find it so tempting to accept shady deals if they include free gifts or choose decent services that offer free shipping over better services that do not. When anything is offered free of charge, Ariely believes your loss aversion system remains inactive. Without it, you don’t weigh the pros and cons with as much attention to detail as you would if you had to factor in potential losses.

http://www.emotionalcompetency.com/revenge.htm

Quotations

The paradox of revenge has inspired many thoughtful quotations. Here are some favorites:

• “Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.” ~ St. Augustine
• “There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.” ~ Josh Billings (1818 – 1885)
• “In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.” ~ Sir Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626)
• “Live well. It is the greatest revenge.” ~ The Talmud

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining

“Co-authoring an article with Pinker in the New York Times (“War Really Is Going Out of Style”), the scholar of international relations Joshua L Goldstein presented a similar view in Winning the War on War: the Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (2011). Earlier, the political scientist John E Mueller (whose work Pinker and Goldstein reference) argued in Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (1989) that the institution of war was disappearing, with the civil wars of recent times being more like conflicts among criminal gangs. Pronounced in the summer of 1989 when liberal democracy seemed to be triumphant, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history” – the disappearance of large-scale violent conflict between rival political systems – was a version of the same message.

Another proponent of the Long Peace is the well-known utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, who has praised The Better Angels of Our Nature as “a supremely important book … a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline.” In a forthcoming book, The Most Good You Can Do, Singer describes altruism as “an emerging movement” with the potential to fundamentally alter the way humans live.

Among the causes of the outbreak of altruism, Pinker and Singer attach particular importance to the ascendancy of Enlightenment thinking. Reviewing Pinker, Singer writes: “During the Enlightenment, in 17th- and 18th-century Europe and countries under European influence, an important change occurred. People began to look askance at forms of violence that had previously been taken for granted: slavery, torture, despotism, duelling and extreme forms of punishment … Pinker refers to this as ‘the humanitarian revolution’.” Here too Pinker and Singer belong in a contemporary orthodoxy. With other beliefs crumbling, many seek to return to what they piously describe as “Enlightenment values”. But these values were not as unambiguously benign as is nowadays commonly supposed. John Locke denied America’s indigenous peoples any legal claim to the country’s “wild woods and uncultivated wastes”; Voltaire promoted the “pre-Adamite” theory of human development according to which Jews were remnants of an earlier and inferior humanoid species; Kant maintained that Africans were innately inclined to the practice of slavery; the utilitarian Jeremy Benthamdeveloped the project of an ideal penitentiary, the Panopticon, where inmates would be kept in solitary confinement under constant surveillance. None of these views is discussed by Singer or Pinker. More generally, there is no mention of the powerful illiberal current in Enlightenment thinking, expressed in the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks, which advocated and practised methodical violence as a means of improving society.

https://mosaicscience.com/story/pinker/

“Does any kind of spirituality, however non-religiously defined, play a role in his life?

“I’m afraid of using the word ‘spiritual’,” he says. “I mean, I have a sense of awe and wonder – a sense of intellectual vertigo in pondering certain questions. I hesitate to use the word ‘spiritual’ just because it comes with so much baggage about the supernatural.”

Pinker’s next book, The Sense of Style, will be a style manual for writers incorporating insights from cognitive psychology and linguistics. For example, it will offer advice on how to get around “the curse of knowledge” – the difficulty writers face in being unable to place themselves in the mind of a reader who doesn’t already know as much as the writer knows. Or the question of how to relate to one’s imagined reader: insights from psychology, Pinker will argue, show that the appropriate metaphor to keep in mind is one of vision – that “the stance you take as a writer ought to be to pretend that you’re pointing out something in the world that your reader could see with his own eyes if only he were given an unobstructed view”.!

Poetry just hints while prose can flourish more
[As  in giving speeches, Oh, Lord, they are too long]
To persuade us to give our money for the new Cathedral door

I met the new schoolmaster ,oh,my eye, he is a bore
I wish instead of  yapping on he put his thoughts in song
Lieder may well hint while  prose embroiders more

I heard the women talking, they want to share their lore
I hope they do not gossip ,as we know what is damned wrong:
To persuade us to give our money for the new Cathedral door

I am  not a hinter, yet explaining is a chore
I ‘m a victim  to my scruples,they send me round the bend
Prose’s too  articulate, Poetry  hints ,oh metaphor!

Simile,synonym, sin for evermore
Though Jesus is our saviour,absolution will depend
On how much gold we offer for the new Cathedral door

Never  give up hope  yet look at Jesus’ end
See continued horrors in the so called “Holy” Land
Poetry  will hint while prose will labour sure
To persuade the  golden calf to  come ram the new church door