Unlike the noise of cars and phones
That makes our hearts unsteady  and solo
The   heart of earth  keeps rhythms which are its own

We can tune in to these undertones
Walk in time to music soft and slow
Underneath the noise of cars and phones

When I do that ,I Iive down in my bones
And marrow spreads more goodness in its flow
The   heart of earth  keeps rhythms which are its own

The flesh, the bones, the nerves  may sing or moan
What is it that makes us each mellow
Despite the noise of cars and mobile phones

Yet all we are is mortgaged or on loan
Not our houses but our breath that blows
To  the  heart of earth   in rhythmic  poems

We  can co-create with  those who grow
In tune with what all contribute unprobed
Underneath the noise of cars and phones
The   heart of earth  keeps rhythms it calls its own

Kissing eases stress and painful thought
I don’t know  the sample size they checked
But  blow a kiss whenever  love ignites

Kissing makes our eyes look very bright
Unless it’s what they call a little peck
Kissing eases stress and painful thought

A kiss can make our burdens seem more light
Enables us to empty worry sacks
So  throw a kiss whenever  love feels right

Love can heal dark  feelings that  destroy
And makes the world seem fairer and less black
Kissing eases stress and painful thought

Giving and receiving  bring insight
Helps us find the remedy we lack
So share a kiss whenever  love feels right

Every situation has its cracks
Light shines through, revealing the right track
Kissing  is more fun than idle thought
So  blow a kiss  and let your  love ignite,

The pain has come again to my lost heart
The ache of grief seems crueller in the night
As it was when  we were  forced apart

At first, the numbness made me loth to start
Yet like the  morning sun, I hurt with light
The pain has come again into my heart

I  listen for some guidance, kind comfort
To my inner self and wisdom’s might
As I knew  before we had to part

But guidance only  comes to those with art
To read the signs, and understand their plight
The pain has come once more into my heart

Death itself had beauty of a sort
As you went without struggle or fight
Wonder came, it seems we had to part

Why is pain so strong it seems to bite?
An anger and a rage it can impart
The numbness made my feelings dead and dark
The pain had come again into my heart

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/we-are-our-situations-poetry-christopher-gilbert

” I am
into small steps here—­I total the bits of me.
I have lived in countless places, childless,
without song, and now no church of time ahead
behind whose doors one can walk and be
transformed, enormous, again, and facing the sky.

This self becomes a tourist both displaced and situated in his displacement. Selfhood becomes an act of existential improvisation. Selfhood becomes as fluid and difficult as language. These are not difficult poems, but difficulty is often their subject: the difficulty of the gaps between selves, between being and thinking, between timelessness and time. They strive “to build,” as Gilbert writes in the poem “Turning into Dwelling,” “this language house . . . this loving which lives outside time.” The new collection’s title, Turning into Dwelling, underscores the ways the self is simultaneously restless and reflective in Gilbert’s body of work. His poetry makes “turning” both a motion and an act of transformation, and “dwelling” both a shelter and an act of rumination.

I am still, despite countless readings these last years, being introduced to Christopher Gilbert and his selves. He died at the young age of fifty-­seven on July 5, 2007, in Providence, Rhode Island. Graywolf Press published Across the Mutual Landscape, when Michael S. Harper selected it for the 1983 Walt Whitman Award. Harper was one of the first poets I emailed in 2010 to ask about Gilbert. He told me Gilbert had died of an “inherited kidney problem”; that as an undergraduate he’d studied with Robert Hayden at the University of Michigan. Part of me wonders how much Gilbert was shaped by his relationships with Hayden, Harper, and Knight. Gilbert, born in Alabama, was, like Knight, a southern transplant; Gilbert, like Hayden, was raised in industrial Michigan; Gilbert, like Harper, lived much of his adult life in Providence, Rhode Island.”

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/sick

“I cannot go to school today,"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
“I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I’m going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I’ve counted sixteen chicken pox
And there’s one more—that’s seventeen,
And don’t you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut—my eyes are blue—
It might be instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I’m sure that my left leg is broke—
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button’s caving in,
My back is wrenched, my ankle’s sprained,
My ‘pendix pains each time it rains.
My nose is cold, my toes are numb.
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow’s bent, my spine ain’t straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There is a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is—what?
What’s that? What’s that you say?
You say today is. . .Saturday?
G’bye, I’m going out to play!”

Shel Silverstein

Flee amidst the winter snow.
No little frowns in Bethlehem
Harlot’s ribbons for her hair
God didn’t fake the little-seen nipples.
I’ll love as ever deplored.
The snow laid roundabouts free.
Oh, hum all ye faithful.
As tested with day class.
We long to wee ah, oh!
Good pass, my love, you hit my gong
Greensleeves, ah, what a fright/save a bite
On Richmond’s pills, I loved no cost
Try an anti-depressant like loving your femur.
The Ten Commandments were God’s way of dropping a hint.Luckily Moses had a bag for the Tablet.
The Earl I loved was beautiful and so was old Soho.
Queen of the Bray
I loved an ass

Signs and symbols guide the route.
Love gives the soul her appetite.
Though the night is black and starless,
The inner guide is never careless.

The notes are struck, the tune is played,
Plain melodies are overlaid.
In this chant and benediction,
Healing comes for desolation.

Though the passageway is narrow,
This road is the one to follow.
Struggling through the mud and mire,
We see, in darkness, tongues of fire.

The sacred centre of our life
Is never found without some strife.
Just then, the dark and light combine,
To create a symbol for the mind

Real and true, our feelings crushed give pain
Though beautiful dried flowers are shown much grace
Yet lying does not aid us nor does blame

Can we be kind and in kindness contain
The sorrow and oblivion of our place?
Real and true, our feelings crushed give pain

Do we fear to lurch  and be insane:
Lose our minds and live with that disgrace
Lying does not aid us nor does blame

The grapes are crushed and then made into wine
Yet humans tested cry for our embrace.
Real and true, our feelings crushed give pain

Dark our faces grow as if in shame
What has brought us to this awful place
Lying does not aid us nor does blame

Round the room all night I endless pace
Seeking  of the lost a tiny trace
Real and true, our feelings crushed give pain
Will we find the space  to play again?

Now I see the shadows on the wall
And in my heart. I feel the savage loss
Down I come, and with the dust, I fall

Once I scarcely saw the bad at all
And did not think of love and what it cost
Now I see the shadows on the wall

Down amid the weeds I find my call
And  mixed with dark green leaves I am compost
As down I come, and to the dust, I fall

Brilliance cannot last and life appals
In between my cells comes sudden frost
Oh, I feel the cracks within my walls

We  love between the lines with all we feel
Then broken by the cold we join the lost
Down we come, and into  dust, we fall

Must we live and what shall living cost?
Is it ours to judge the present past?
As I watch the shadows on the wall
Down  comes Love and  holds me as I fall

With my foolish love, I once fell for,
After words  seductive and sustained,
A man  who could not trust those he implored

Struck by anguish plain, I then desired
For love  to be rewakened and attained
With a new felt love, I still was for.

Like a worm or beetle on dirt floors
I took to earth to feel the dark again
Forget the man  whose trust was quite impaired

Nervous and uncertain, still unsure
I tried to find the measure of this pain
Caused by loving love   while immature

An agonising ache seeped through my pores
As if  I needed heavy violent rain
To cleanse me from the man who called me whore.

And  now I am appalled and to, ashamed
If we’re touched by love, it leaves its stain
With  ferocious grief , so undermined
I wander in the marshlands of the mind

Maybe death is somewhat like a birth
Forces from elsewhere possess our souls
And in the end, we all must come to earth
No need to work on any other goal

Who decides that one child must be born
Although it has not  grown for 40 weeks
And what a fear when from the womb it’s torn
We don’t remember as we could not speak.

Nature’s wild and lets so many die
As if like sperm, the eggs are well supplied
The well of tears will not like deserts dry
And we’ve lost  the meanings with our guides

As infants in the womb must not fear birth
Acceptance of sad facts brings happiness

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48422/aubade-56d229a6e2f07

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170927-the-words-that-can-make-us-calmer

A Tribute to Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu. ( Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu (10 July 1956 – 6 April 1979) was a South African operative of the African National Congress (ANC) military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). He was convicted of murder by the brutal Apartheid regime. He was executed by hanging in 1979 ) You were the tip of the spear, the […]

via A Tribute to Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu — Scribbled Verse

I love to kiss your honey skin at night
When we ‘ve finished strugggling for the day
When we pull the cord,  turn off  our light
I like  caressing your dear skin at night
Although deprived of seeing your eyes bright
And guessing what it is you want to say
I am always grateful for this homely sight
Of ancient skin and hair that’s white not grey
I like to kiss your body with delight
We have loved much in our own sweet play.

Your loving eye by which my heart is touched
As my eye meets  yours on  a red  bus
Gives my morning  happiness so rich
The sun caresses with  a mother’s fuss

As I walk, the land seems full of grace.
The waitress shows me kindness with intent
I watch the cultural mixtures and embrace
The crowds of strangers and the feelings sent

The sun so low makes patterns  on the ground
Dazzles both my eyes and inner mind
A single pigeon walks but makes no sound
I  wish the sparrows well but see no kind

Happiness  comes best from small events
If our eyes are open and our sense.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49001/ariel

https://www.mhpbooks.com/science-has-now-proved-that-poetry-gives-us-the-feels/

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
(Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire)

A splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
(William Carlos Williams, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus)

Jenny, your mind commands
kingdoms of black and white
(Lisel Mueller, Reading the Brothers Grimm to Jenny)

I’ve always been able to remember certain lines of poetry — words that, once read, imprinted themselves onto my brain without my even trying to remember them. And beyond that, poems that have literally made me shiver, or cry, or tingle, or sob, or reach for my favorite teddy bear to help contain the feelings. (I’m looking at you, Kenneth Koch).

For anyone out there like me, we can rest assured that science has our back. A recent study by a quintet of German and Norwegian researchers, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, makes the claim that poetry, when we hear it read aloud, elicits emotional, physical, and neurological responses not too dissimilar from those produced by music. Said another way, poetry can make the hair rise on the back of your neck, and now we can prove it.

Can you pronounce awry
Come, tell no lie
It’s not said like Tory
That’s my little story
It rhymes with pie
I’ll love till I die

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. H. L. Mencken
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/h_l_mencken_490503

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/jun/26/poem-of-the-week-in-no-strange-land-by-francis-thompson

“The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.”

“William Blake’s visionary transformations of London form the poem’s most important literary ancestry. In Thompson’s work more generally there’s also an occasional, probably coincidental, resemblance to Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), going beyond the shared faith to sometimes tortuous grammatical structures, vivid word-coinings, and unconventional rhythm. While Thompson’s achievements may be more modest than those of Blake or Hopkins, In No Strange Land is a poem I imagine either would have been happy to have written. A “many-splendoured” hymn, it catches more light than any of the Choruses from “The Rock”.”