Author: Katherine

Poetry writer and author

As high as a balloon let free in hell

Punctured by his words my spirits fell
I landed in a muddy, unfenced  drain
But as my face was blank, no-one could tell

As high as a balloon let free in hell
I tried a look of pride and deep disdain
But  ruptured by his words, my spirits fell

As stupid as a cat with a loud bell
For lack of mice, I’d cry and I’d complain
But as my voice is dim, no-one could tell

As placid as a milkshake which won’t sell
As  winsome as  a triolet on a train
Punctured by his  glance, my spirits fell

As optimistic as  the  sun in early Fall
As wise as was the jury of Dunblane
But as my voice was cracked, no-one  was thrilled

 

As sorry as a head with a migraine
As  cosy as a cat  by windows framed
Intense and metered like a villanelle
As my eyes are black, I cannot spell

 

So sharp

My pens and pencils are all well prepared
I have got a box of rubbers too
The pencils are so sharp they read my mind
And write down what they want me not to do

I am obsessed with implements and tools
But what are they without a task  to do?
Pens can write the words of any fool
As thinking is still legal although free

In my dreams I  meet with my old man
He wants me to go with him to Japan
I cannot get my pills inside my can
Thus I  will become an also ran

For nonsense is the wisdom of the Least
And all are welcome at the Pauper’s Feast

“Human Punctures”

My  new book “Human Punctures” will be published if and only if we stay in the EU.If you are Dutch please email me for a free tyre repair kit
You will be happy to know my electricity payments have not risen this year so no fuse wire is needed.
My Gas Service is being conducted by the Vicar as snow stopped British Gas from getting  to me.
My water is being analysed by Oxford University and I may be rewarded  by free leaks
I will have a bath this year.Then next year I’ll have a  toilet.
Oxford_Cornmarket

 

  • Many  men’s hands make the lights work free
  • Two beds are better than one if you hate your  legs touching in the night.
  • Too many rooks died in the broth.
    Pleasure twice, cut at once
    You can’t have your cake and eat  my shoe
    A bird in the band is worth  a coo in the bush.
    The bride comes before all the maids
  • Don’t haunt Charles Dickens before he’s lost
    Is it   today  tomorrow?
    Please bite clowns

Inside out, no person saw me float

The rain fell on my new striped woollen coat
The stripes are red and blue and green and white
It struck me that  it needed creosote

To save my coat ,I turned it inside out
I started a new fashion or a blight.
The rain fell on my new striped woollen coat

My mind was fey and I was dull with doubt
Thought has never offered much delight
It struck me that such  fancies are remote

Inside out, no person saw  me float
Through the  swollen gutter water’s  grates
The water got a grip on my  faux stoat

Is this the Flood, or merely a blocked spout?
It’s hard to judge when  staying alive’s  one’s fate
It struck me that such garments are too “haute”

My main fault is of being too polite
Which makes men of a sullen type ignite
The rain fell on my new striped woollen coat
I found it is acrylic, and it smokes

 

 

 

 

 

Tell them home is where to start

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Stan was cooking tea that day,

While his wife went out to play.

He cooked a pie of frogs and cress,

He wanted to impress.

Stan was wearing his old clothes.

Where old clothes come from,no-one knows.

He meant to change when he was done,

So he and Mary could have fun.

But Anne his neighbour rang the bell,

Stan was so surprised he fell.

He hit his head upon the stove,

And his poor scalp turned blue and mauve.

Ring 999 and ask for Dave,

This man is old yet must be saved

The paramedic gave him glue

To stick together his old shoe.

Then he rubbed on arnica..

His  head looked like Guernica.

“Get the camera,take a pic.”

Stan was feeling rather sick.

“How can you use my wounds as art?

Rest assured I’ll take no part.”

He hit the camera with his stick,

And felled his mistress with a brick.

So now they’re in a mixed sex ward,

This experience can be shared.

They get their food at 3 am

Half for the ladies,half for the men.

The doctor asked them what went wrong.

Both of them had lost their tongues.

Neither would say what they’d done!

Now their anger is all gone.

The moral of my myth is this:

Being an  adult is not bliss.

Mistresses can be a pain,

Especially if they’re very vain.

And better not to look for love,

Except with cats or sweet white doves.

Let your neighbour love you less!

And don’t make comments on his dress.

And as for voyeurs,keep a crutch.

Hit them hard, but not too much.

If they want a work of Art,

Tell them home is where to start.

How like a false god are my own beliefs

How like a prison are my own beliefs
Beliefs about my world and my desires
To give them up might give me much relief
Yet wish for safety  grips those who aspire

Anxiety will  curtail and make us tired
Its cheap  and free, no pill will give relief
Nor pacify the  tangles of barbed wire
How like a false god are my own beliefs

 

No crown  for she who suckles on  her grief
Nor for those who secretly are liars
Nor for those who fall like early leaves
When autumn has not lit its smokey fires

A new language of love may set us free
If only I can gently hold back me

 

Imprisoned spirits

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How like a prison   is my cubicle;

A prison,a trap, a cell,a place of fear.

For humans,this  is truth indubitable;

We need to roam ,to see,to smell,to hear.

 

Yet in the bureaucrat realm , we must observe,

The rules laid down by  generations gone.

And from their ancient code we cannot swerve.

Even if by rules we are undone.

 

Did Euclid discover how grave was a bath?

Did Moses fear  to see the burning bush?

Did Einstein follow someone’s else’s path?

Did Socrates  give voice to utter trash?

 

Imprisoned spirits are to revolution called.

Lest by Ariel they should be mauled.

 

 





	


	



			
				


			

			
Darkness  flees in shock
		
	
	

		
Suddenly  it’s light at 5 o’clock

I  hear the chiming of a distant bell

The day expands as darkness takes a knock


Darkness brings on judgement and its dock

Time to question ,now we are in hell

Suddenly  it’s light at 5 o’clock


Our conscience can be cold, and. heartless,  mock

Why hate ourself and love another well?

Now day expands and darkness takes  the mick


 


Inside we feel we sinned then darkness struck

Prefer to be strong sinners than weak selves

Suddenly it’s light at 5 o’clock


Helpless in a universe star rocked

Who can bear the  infinite,  its wealth?

Glad day expands and darkness takes a knock


How good dreams guide us in their very stealth

Till all was, is and ever will be well

Suddenly  it’s light at 5 o’clock

Light day expands and darkness  flees in shock

	


	



			
				


			

			
Interview with writer Amy Bloom
		
	
	

		
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/13/amy-bloom-interview-god-love






Amy Bloom outside her Connecticut home
 Amy Bloom outside her Connecticut home Photograph: Dan Callister






When Amy Bloom writes, she tends to hear things before she can see them. For example, the title of her second collection of stories, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, was something an old boyfriend had said to her, so sweet and well phrased she suspects it prolonged the doomed relationship. In “Your Borders, Your Rivers, Your Tiny Villages” a woman observes that her husband and his friend “talk like they’ve just come from a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff”. They are white-collar workers, watching TV news, in the US equivalent of Surrey. “It’s either a first sentence,” says Bloom, “or it’s a little conversation between two people, and then suddenly I know who’s saying it. I hear the speaker and then I see the character and then I see the story.”


The men in the living room with their important opinions open her third collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, which sounds like a Judy Blume novel but is a decisively grown-up compilation of two quartets and four stand-alone pieces. It is a strange assortment, held together by Bloom’s unerring tone: sharp, dark, flatly hilarious, full of crises revisited which, with a chiropractic snap, are put into sudden perspective by those who have suffered them. There are the small transgressions – a teenager who paints a picture of the crucifixion on her trouser leg (“I’m not mocking Jesus,” I told my mother. “I’m just representing him, on my jeans”) – and the large ones: a woman who has slept with her own stepson, an old bully with Alzheimer’s who throws things at his family. All are recounted with restraint and brevity. A man called William says to his wife, “darling, you are as clear and bright as vinegar but not everyone wants their pipes cleaned”. It’s a sentiment that might apply to the author, who, on a freezing day in Connecticut, poses gamely in a blizzard and issues a friendly warning to the photographer: that in photos she tends to go one of two ways, OK or George Foreman.




 

	


	



			
				


			

			
Happiness- is it usual?
		
	
	

		
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Why are there so many books on happiness and yet less actual happiness?

I like this piece  by Amy Bloom in the  NYT. I find reading reviews makes me happy.Men make me happy of they are humorous.Women do because they converse well.And peace and quiet make me happy.


I’m so happy


Not to be a baby in a nappy.


I feel so blue


When I miss you


I don’t want a lover.


Too much bother.


I like to be alone


Just me and my comb.


Shakespeare was a poet


I know it


And I am not


I quite forgot


As I felt gay


All  of today


I’ll be sad


Or maybe mad


as rotation


is the human situation


OMG!


Related articles







 







	


	



			
				


			

			
In Spring  new life springs out from ancient wood
		
	
	

		
In Spring  new life springs out from ancient wood

Yet at the end of winter we despair

Forsythia yellow is the first in bud


Despair  afflicts  us as we sink in mud

We can’t imagine earth shall be more fair

In Spring  new life springs out from ancient wood


Sap is  rising  silently like blood

Yet we doubt like Thomas with blind stare

Forsythia yellow is the first in bud


A miracle of nature and its good

Men propose and even women  dare

In Spring  new life springs out from ancient wood


Most of life we take on trust and should

For doubt and angst are morbid forms of care

Forsythia yellow ,oh to see it bud!


And  for the Cross, wild Jesus was its flower

For humble virtue  has no earthly power

In Spring  new life springs out from ancient wood

Ancients worshipped, Nature was their  god


 

	


	



			
				


			

			
Is it a sonnet?
		
	
	

		
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photo by Mike Flemming 2015






This poem is written in the sonnet form

And yet I have my doubts about its shape

Though nearly to that structure it conforms

There may be places where non- essence gapes.




It looks and speaks just as a sonnet would

And talks of metaphysical concerns.

Do we conclude, as poets and writers should,

That in our schizoid age we cannot learn?




For humans may be clothed in skin of wolves;

And lambs be decked with lions’ fearsome furs..

Thus senses can be tricked and problems solved.

Which of us will praise a cat  that purrs?




It looks like one,it feels like one,it speaks.

Yet  nothing human’s heard except our shrieks







	


	



			
				


			
				


			

			
Will Jesus ride  a  pure white horse in heaven?
		
	
	

		
Where you live it’s zero thirty seven

Past midnight,past illusion, past despair

Did Jesus, when he died, believe in heaven?


Of his apostles ,there were left eleven

To fight amidst the scrum of human war

Where you live it’s zero thirty seven


When he died the earth itself was riven

The elements electrified   and far

Did Jesus, when he died,  conceive of heaven?


You’re behind me so you have not risen

But lie abed with love soaked skin and hair

Where you live it’s zero thirty seven


Look  with sharpness and with broader vision

Relax your eyes from superhuman stare

Did Jesus when he died arrive in heaven?


The universe of meaning is your lair

The Word is sacred,captains will declare.

Where you live it’s zero thirty seven

Will Jesus ride  a  pure white horse  in heaven?


 


 

	


	



			
				


			
				


			
				


			
				


			

			
So many people
		
	
	

		




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Life is  lonely in the city here

We left our birthplace seeking  work that paid

So many folk, yet nobody is near.


The mass of crowds  brings on a paranoia

While buildings, once thought beautiful, decay

Life is   alien in the city here


From the doorways ugly faces leer

Like evil children,  tortured by dismay

Many people,  nobody who’s near.


The birds don’t sing  I seem to hear them jeer

Then fly in circles in a fierce display

Life is alien in the city here.


My eye is dry, it lacks a single tear

As I am neo- static with despair

Many people,  nobody who’s near.


Why can’t I be merry, if not gay?

Why do thoughts so savage my heart flay

Life is  lonely in the city here

So many folk, so few will come  to cheer


 



	


	



			
				


			

			
Am I the only poet that bothers you?
		
	
	

		
I hate your poetry and your stories too

Poetry is too vague and too  unclear

Why tell me this  when I am feeling blue?


Am I the only poet that bothers you?

Does Shakespeare’s writing fill your heart with fear?

He hates my poetry and my stories too


Critics ignore mood and suffering’s clue

A half thought is a nonsense,that is clear

He tells me this  when I am feeling blue


Use the means to find the ending true

Do not labour so that you can smear

She hates my poetry and my stories few


I’ll be what you intend if you are you

For truthfulness can in its way  endear

He tells me lies  but one day he will rue.


In our life the unknown source will steer

To us it’s feared, to him it’s always clear

Irate  with poetry; gored by stories too

Why tell me this  when I am feeling you?

	


	



			
				


			

			
Is poetry for everyone?
		
	
	

		
Photo0027http://www.oaklandmagazine.com/November-2017/Making-a-Case-That-Poetry-Is-for-Everyone-Not-Just-the-Elite/


 


 


“Is it question or declaration? Minus punctuation, it is either/or and both. Written with wonderful passion, crushing honesty, brevity, and flair, Zapruder addresses a question he has been asked or has been asking himself for nearly 25 years. At the root of the question, he suggests, are people taught that understanding and appreciating poetry requires elite education. People who “don’t get it,” therefore, are dullards, duds, dumb. It’s no wonder we walk away from Whitman or toss the Keats for less intimidating literary kicks in novels, nonfiction, and social media. By abandoning the genre, Zapruder argues, readers risk losing out on poetry’s “places of freedom, enlivenment, true communion.”


The Oakland author, Saint Mary’s College associate professor, and The New York Times Magazine poetry editor in 2016 delves into the ways “poetry makes meaning.” His personal encounters with poetry cast a memoir-like tone that renders the dissection of poems instantly alive and prickly with dynamic tension. While reading Zapruder’s coming-of-age-through-poetry story, the thrill drawn by him—and all poets who played or play imaginatively with words—is genuine (when it comes to personal accounts) or well supported by reference to poets’ journals or second-person records and documentation.


Don’t mistake “play,” with frivolity, because Zapruder explores in rich detail and convinces with keen insight evidence that poetry throughout history has held social and political power, defined civilizations, briskly captured complex concepts like “nobility,” or preserved culture and language that might otherwise be lost. Many poems Zapruder dissects dazzle with reductive language that nevertheless captures a universe of meanings.


Essentially, Why Poetry portrays poems as vibrant, contemporary spaces in which imagination rules. Which leads Zapruder to a central premise and arguably the book’s strongest message: Certain times—or, even more so, uncertain times—make poems vital. Post the 2016 election, students in his graduate seminar were despondent or “wandering through anxious, uncertain, shifting futures.” He read to them one of his favorite poems, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” by Frank O’Hara. Making them laugh, the opening stanza offers subtle humor and acceptance despite being “different.” A following stanza encourages them to “always embrace things, people earth / sky stars, as I do, freely and with / the appropriate sense of space.””

	


	



			
				


			

			
God’s  richness   falls like tears from his great eyes.
		
	
	

		
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Such complex beauty lasts for a short time

We create photos  for our memory bank

God is rich and richness is no crime


Rich plays are  enacted in our dreams

They are lost and have no  name or rank

Natural beauty lasts for a brief time


Is our life elaborate  a game?

Surely we are grateful ,offer thanks

God is rich and richness is no crime


Each moment  must be kissed, if but by rhyme.

Beauty  dwells in  beads of moments strung.

Their beauty  is not finite in love’s time


The church bell rings for those with memories lame

And as it chimes, eternal is each ring

God  be praised; such  praising is no crime


Spring is  here, I hear the birds in song

The nestlings shiver, sensing human wrongs

Such complex beauty lasts for  such short times

God’s  richness pools like tears from his great eyes.

	


	



			
				


			

			
The broken lamp
		
	
	

		
I cannot mend the lamp that we both chose

The top and bottom split when  he fell down

But I can make it look as if it glows


The candle burns with fragrances of rose

That takes away my sadness and my frown

I cannot mend the lamp that we both chose


I find it hard to  bear the pain of loss

The concept is  more verbal than it’s noun

But in my room  the candle  brightly glows


In Blythburgh church, a lighted candle  bless

See, the painted saints wear golden crowns!

I  will bear this breakage and its cost


I will get the strength to bear my cross

Oh,haul me, holy one, if I fall down.

Beyond  these lights we sense  the Light of God


Bless the hand that points us past the known

Where each of us must travel,all alone

I cannot mend the lamp that we both chose

I  stumble in my grief amongst the low

	


	



			
				


			

			
Maybe grace
		
	
	

		
Distant sparrows faint but musical

The rasp of the  papery pages when I closed my book

Click of the keys

A faint humming in the air

A blackbird

The boiler comes on with a jolt

I see the lamp and it shadow  on the wall

The blue glass bottles

A book I thought I’d lost

My sewing basket

The other lamp is lit.

My nose sniffles

My back is aching

I dreamed my husband was here and we were packing to go away in a hurry

I feel good when I get into bed in cold weather

My husband still looks the same.He wants me to move but it’s too late.I have forgotten something

I wake up with a happy heart

The hot water feels good on my skin

I drink tea in mug after mug

This chair may be too high

I smell the candle burning

Smell  air coming through a crack in the frame

I feel my skin calling out

My feet on the floor

Gravity

And maybe grace

	


	



			
				


			

			
Take care of the Pence
		
	
	

		
The mail men were tagging my head as I am much wanted


I make a hack  bleat


Take care of the Pence and the hounds will take care of themselves


Wake a leg or two


Make love  tracks


Shake the wit on Hampstead Heath


Fake a cake using rubber and glue


Take the guilt off the winger’s bed


Take  your upper hand off


Take umbrage as a gift  if invited to tea in the UK


Take with a rain of salt water on ice


They married but he has taken  her back


 He has  the walk of a Devil


Stalk the talk


Talk through one’s cat


Talk to the right hand


Not at all gory


There’s no such thing as a free hunch


Lazy  old sayings


That seems tawdry

	


	



			
				


			

			
It’s not a crime and it’s not a sin but it hurts
		
	
	

		










nearby-salisbury-stonehengeWhat  name do we give to an action by another person that hurts us badly and yet they have not broken the law?

Like they ring up and say we should have put a comment on their blog when  they know we’ve been very busy at work… then we have not visited their

FB page this week… or some other complaint.There is a disparity sometimes between how we are and how others see us.We may be depressed and hardly able to function,they are cross we didn’t phone them for a chat

[ie  they moan for 36 minutes whilst we listen..}


Maybe it is a sin.Nowadays we don’t use that word.But if we do not use our imagination to understand another person’s life and trials then we are  lacking in some way if this happens a lot.


In psychoanalysis it seems that people do such things because of an identification with an archaic mother image or because they were punished for wetting the bed… there is no personal responsibility..


Some of us go the other way and are over-responsible even in some cases people think they have caused the Gaza conflict or another war when they are actually mentally unwell.They are tormented.


We need to be in the middle.We need to learn to not respond to other’s excess demands and if we start to think we caused the trouble in Palestine we need to visit the doctor and take a friend for support



	


	



			
				


			

			
The alphabet by Karl Shapiro
		
	
	

		


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The letters of the Jews as strict as flames

Or little terrible flowers lean

Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages,

Singing through solid stone the sacred names.

The letters of the Jews are black and clean

And lie in chain-line over Christian pages.

The chosen letters bristle like barbed wire

That hedge the flesh of man,

Twisting and tightening the book that warns.

These words, this burning bush, this flickering pyre

Unsacrifices the bled son of man

Yet plaits his crown of thorns.


http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-alphabet-5/


Where go the tipsy idols of the Roman

Past synagogues of patient time,

Where go the sisters of the Gothic rose,

Where go the blue eyes of the Polish women

Past the almost natural crime,

Past the still speaking embers of ghettos,

There rise the tinder flowers of the Jews.

The letters of the Jews are dancing knives

That carve the heart of darkness seven ways.

These are the letters that all men refuse

And will refuse until the king arrives

And will refuse until the death of time

And all is rolled back in the book of days.







	


	



			
				


			

			
Will any human see?
		
	
	

		
This change of life means I am never me

The  me I was when you lived by my side

Who I am now,  nobody can see


We walked on long white  beaches edging sea

Where horses cantered in the spacious wide

But changing life means I am not  your me


If you were here I know you would agree

That losing half our soul makes us afraid

Who I am ,  will any human see?


 


I live  and feel like  lost, cold refugee

Even as the memories pale and fade

For changing life means I don’t feel like   me


I  love and cherish your  red maple tree

The sun gleams through those twigs and sparrows play

Who I am ,  will any human see?


We take for granted what’s a normal state

The world seems solid,human, will not break

This change of life means I am never me

Who I am now, even I can’t see


 

	


	



			
				


			

			
If you know this you can become a British citizen
		
	
	

		
I’ve got art’s writers in my joints

Why did the retina detach? It had avoidant personality disorder

Why did I get migraine in my heart? Because I had not got  the head for it

Why did my artery spasm?  The heart has its reasons; the arteries we don’t know.

Apparently my heart has become the holy grill

I can still fear angels

Why did I write this nonsense? I envy Lear

Why did Lewis Carroll?

Do you like nonsense? I do.

	


	



			
				


			

			
Do you really believe in Flu?
		
	
	

		
article-2188441-148A1945000005DC-851_634x462 (1)She’s got  foot in mouth disease.

The doctor says I have got weasels,

Then she got harlot’s fever and went  out blazing

Men get about or is it stout?

It’s chick and fox

Do you really believe in Flu?

My sister had  onion surgery last year  and she still weeps.

She said she feels cogitated all night so I let  her learn Boolean logic

I don’t want a mare tonight.I am married.

Why do we scheme unconsciously?

Was it entirely hands in glove?

I’ve gone mad and fallen in love.My husband  had called  for release.

Housewives knees are often a nuisance.Why not remove them>

	


	



			
				


			
				


			

			
I could run through the entire alphabet
		
	
	

		
I spend an hour in worry everyday

From lists of all disorders on the net

Then  the Wars which on the feeble prey


I wonder sometimes if I might be gay

Although one’s gender is not quite preset

I spend an hour in worry everyday


War in Syria,Palestine. and more

I could run through the entire alphabet

To name the Wars which on  so many prey


I give an extra hour , you cruel whore!

She wants me to be anxious tete a tete

I spend more hours in worry everyday


If I’m tired I cannot shut that door~

The conscious self’s invaded, thoughts preset

Don’t name the Wars, just kneel and say a prayer


Has the Devil laughed and  placed his bets

That the human race the world will wreck?

I spend an hour in worry everyday

I’ve had enough,I’m more  inclined to pray