I don’t know my gender
So I am a  pretender
I’m dressing in a modest kind of way
I wear some cotton trousers
A red skirt and three blouses
And I wore a tweed man’s overcoat today
Since I’ve been getting  lonesome
I invented a companion
Half of me is male,I say,I say.
He writes all  the sonnets
And says he knows  who dunnit.
And I write villanelles with love and care.
When someone seems enchanted
I feel  a dilettante
For I dress  quite like a boy and get half fare
And then they see my  tunics
Embroidered and perfumed
They feel confused and have a new excuse to stare,
Thank God for the Muslims
I imitate their costumes
I am happy to modest, don’t  you glare.

A prison is a place to meditate
No distraction  and no  need to fake
Nor murder other inmates by mistake

But do you feel ashamed of your new state?
Think of all the MP’s who’re disgraced
Illness gives one time to meditate

To be alone is not what love dictates
Especially if you have no time to waste
You must not murder others by mistake

If inclined to madness,hesitate.
Think of Leonard Cohen and all he wrote
Depression gives one aeons to meditate

Have an illness rather than  a mate
If you  have no lamb then get a goat
It  could murder apples in a bate.

If you swim  don’t wear a heavy coat
If you wander, you might find  new mates
A bedroom is a place to meditate
Do not murder  lovers by mistake

https://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/walt_whitman_13352

“Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am;
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary;
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head, curious what will come next;
Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and
contenders;
I have no mockings or arguments—I witness and wait.

5
I believe in you, my Soul—the other I am must not abase itself to you;
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat;
Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the
best;
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning;
How you settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my
bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the
argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own;
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters
and lovers;
And that a kelson of the creation is love;
And limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the fields;
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them;
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, and heap’d stones, elder, mullen and
poke-weed.

6
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.”

 Today I opened wide my eyes,
And stared with wonder and surprise,
To see beneath November skies
An apple blossom peer;
Upon a branch as bleak as night
It gleamed exultant on my sight,
A fairy beacon burning bright
Of hope and cheer.

"Alas!" said I, "poor foolish thing,
Have you mistaken this for Spring?
Behold, the thrush has taken wing,
And Winter's near.
"
Serene it seemed to lift its head:
"The Winter's wrath I do not dread,
Because I am," it proudly said,
"A Pioneer.

"Some apple blossom must be first,
With beauty's urgency to burst
Into a world for joy athirst,
And so I dare;
And I shall see what none shall see -
December skies gloom over me,
And mock them with my April glee,
And fearless fare.

"And I shall hear what none shall hear -
The hardy robin piping clear,
The Storm King gallop dark and drear
Across the sky;
And I shall know what none shall know -
The silent kisses of the snow,
The Christmas candles' silver glow,
Before I die.

"Then from your frost-gemmed window pane
One morning you will look in vain,
My smile of delicate disdain
No more to see;
But though I pass before my time,
And perish in the grale and grime,
Maybe you'll have a little rhyme
To spare for me.

The 3 Reasons Why You Can’t Draw, (And What to Do About It)

“What if I told you, you talk too much

Talking and drawing don’t mix.

The main problems associated with drawing is when you talk you engage your logical, language dominated left side of the brain. This side of your brain is keen on knowing an objects name, labelling it, and organising it.

Often when learning to draw, you need to temporarily hold off judgment and try not to second guess what you think the object should look like, rather than what the object actually looks like.

When you are trying to learn to draw something realistically, you have to engage your right-hand side of the brain, which is keener on images and spatial perception.

It’s very hard to do both at the same time.

Why?

Because it causes mind freeze.

Have you ever been in a creative zone of absorption, a state where time travels quickly and you are in what psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow’.

How Does It Feel to Be in Flow?

1. Completely involved in what we are doing – focused, concentrated.
2. A sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.
3. Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done, and how well we are doing.
4. Knowing that the activity is doable – that skills are adequate to the task.
5. A sense of serenity – no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego.
6. Timelessness – thoroughly focused on the present, our sin to pass by in minutes.
7. Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.

Flow is the mental state when you are fully immersed in an activity, a feeling of full involvement and energy.

You can get to this stage of involvement whilst drawing… until you get interrupted.

The combination of left and right battling against each other makes trying to draw tricky”

Everybody’s not  the same as you
Some like Mozart some like Whipsnade Zoo
Stone the crows ,I’m feeling very blue

I like eggs stuffed with  Ceylon tea.
What the Dickens can a writer do?
Everybody’s not  the same as me.

Everybody’s unique and it is true
Many cannot solve a crossword clue.
Stone the crows as they are feeling blue

I like avacados’ mystery
I  stole mother’s lovely superglue
Everybody’s not the same as me

When I answer, don’t say. who are you?
I’m your friend and my cat cannot mew.
Love the crows for they are black not blue

If the world ends,baby, I love you
And I love your toolset, is that new?
Everybody’s not  the same dark hue.
Stone the crows ,I’m feeling cobalt blue

Five years, 9,000 posts.Fine images by Mike Flemming
I can’t believe it is so long.Thank you,every reader and viewer

The nights are stretched like canvases on walls
Black and matt  without the least starlight
They evoke our disillusion with the real

From summer’s light , unwilling, England falls
We feel the tension  and the  flick of night
Dreams are hung; Picasso’s echo wails

The unconscious can so swiftly  be revealed
It  steals away  our own nspoken thoughts
Evoking  the illusion  we are real

Before the Judge speaks,do not  lies conceal
What we’ve sold and what we might have bought
Dreams are hung  like criminals unhealed

Gossip’s  sickly like bought ready meal
We omit the details  history taught:
Needed disillusion with the “real”

After war,  the trail of losses ought
To  signify no future fiction’s taught
The  Jewish nights, nails scratching wailing walls
With their  burning , G-d himself  has failed

Bio

“Beginning with the psychological objectification, how often do we find ourselves listening to the other only to feed our own assessment of that person and what we believe categorises them? Our internal thought process conducts commentaries, when in conversation, in-between ‘listening’ to the other: ‘Ah, well, Rebecca would say that because she never lets go of her feminist position.’ Or ‘Charlie is such a passive aggressive, look he’s doing it again’ etc. The end result, of such ‘superior’ psychological insight though is the same as the unsophisticated stance, which we have all done and have had done to us: not listening. Whilst conducting our assessment of the other, as they converse with us, we are in fact guilty of the same sin as those ignorant minded folk who appear at every opportunity not to listen to what is being said to them. Both methodologies, from the ‘superior’ to the more base and unsophisticated, are snapshots of the same spectrum which exists to keep the temperature of our inner selves at a cool low, hovering around the freezing point, which also signifies a life lost to pointless self-certainty and social alienation.”

Please press the link above  the extract to find a very interesting blog

via About

Why I Don’t Go To Church Anymore: Living in the Relational Church – Part 6

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/sep/05/bukowski

“In the rush to file away Bukowski as a booze-addled fluke, his ability to lay down a truly beautiful line has often been overlooked. Take these lines describing the genesis of Los Angeles:

this land punched-in cuffed-out divided held like a crucifix in a deathhand

Or take his poem Tragedy of the Leaves which ends with the heartbreaking lines:

and I walked into a dark hall where the landlady stood execrating and final, sending me to hell, waving her fat, sweaty arms and screaming screaming for rent because the world has failed us both.

Reading his extensive back catalogue you will stumble upon a hundred, a thousand moments of brilliance like these.

Bukowski embodies the idea of the “punk poet” even better than the poets who came from the punk scene. Jim Carroll and Patti Smith were too in thrall to the romanticism of Rimbaud to truly “speak it plain”. It is Bukowski’s machine gun delivery that creates poetry that actually relates to the back-to-basics ethos of punk rock.

Unlike most poets, Bukowski was also a master prose writer. My favourite work of Bukowski’s has to be the short story collection Hot Water Music. This 1983 anthology is Bukowski at his prime, and contains some of the best writing the man ever produced: The Death of the Father (parts 1 and 2) is a heartbreaking – yet ghoulishly funny – dissection of the days following his father’s death. Some Hangover opens with the shocking premise that our narrator has just awoken with a hangover and no recollection of the night before, and is accused of molesting his neighbour’s daughters while in an alcoholic blackout. Not Quite Bernadette features the attention-grabbing opener: “I wrapped the towel around my bloody cock and called the doctor’s office.” What all of these stories share is a writing style that has been totally pared back, and a view of humanity that is cynical, deadpan, and almost entirely without judgment.”

http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-9/radical-communities-modern-community-movement.html

Short-eared Durham owl
meditating over the dale's edge,
shadows the fields and folds
in elegant diurnal flight.

On windside,careful sight
may swoop to prey
and away.

Your yellow broad-eyed look,
at once both sharp and distant,
holds me.
Oh,silence,
Oh,wind on green,
Oh, earth,
Sky.

Immense your held vision,
sphere without centre,
pied geometer of flight,
sketch your descent and ascent.

Trees bunched by dry stone wall
call heart home.

1,Mrs Smith:  accidentally pulled off the cat’s tail while cooking a chicken which the cat had caught.Unsure if A & E would treat cats.Accepted.
2.Mr Smith: collapsed with unstable angina after seeing  his cat with no tail.Solution, persuaded him it was a Manx cat until we found the appropriate glue.Cat OK.Man still wobbly
3 Angela Smith aged 14.Drunk and disorderly because of swigging brandy on seeing  a hallucinatory cat’s tail flying about.Admitted to  Donald Winnicott  Real Self Unit N.78
Expected to become real within 4 years if held correctly.Ironical as it was not a real hallucination.No vocabulary exists which can be understood by nurses with Master’s Degrees  to give the right label for believing Reality is a a mere Hallucination personal to  one’s self.
4 Jack Smith: fell down  the stairs as an attention seeking action.Broke all his fingernails but otherwise seems quite normal considering the rest of the family

signed: K.Settlement Ph.D [Bad language]
University College,Watford-on-Sea. [2004]
M A {Oxon}1991.Dissertation:On symmetry in differential operators {Failed}
M Sc.{ Watford] 2000 [How to change light bulbs with one hand using Newton’s laws of motion} [ almost managed to fail]

The summer heat  made cobblestones like stoves
The Coronation  happened,  I know now
We played with melted tar, industrial wains.

My mother’s hands were black and much beloved
The coal and coke had tattooed her, we knew.
The summer heat made cobbles hot as stoves.

In the road, we played our ancient games
The older children passed the knowledge down
We played with melted tar, industrial wains.

The bully boys  were cruel , did not heed love
A little boy had tried to be a clown
In summer heat, they beat him on the stones.

We were silent as they flaunted power again;
But in our hearts, we knew we’d let him down
We threw warn melted tar, industrial wains

And in our phantasy, he was alone.
Noone knew who threw the vicious stone
The summer heat  made cobbles feel like flames
We played with melted tar, Christ died again

https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/irony-satire-sarcasm/irony

https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/irony-satire-sarcasm/

Some days I remember that old job
Long hours and low pay  and nothing good
Working for a well known catalogue

A man came round as  nasty as a frog
He shouted,faster,stupid women,are you wood?
Sometimes I remember that old job

If we had to pee, they kept a log
Seemed as if they wanted guts and blood
Working for a cruel catalogue

The men were bosses at the old golf club
They  thought that they were wonders as they trod
I don’t  need  reminding of that job

This was long before I had a blog
No-one knew  those sacrilegious pigs
Working for  mail order catalogues

I nearly  lost my mind ,maybe I did
Sinking very slowly in the mud
Even now I shudder at that job
Working for a famous catalogue

I asked my boyfriend to stop smoking so he went outside threw himself into the old bath full of rainwater.When the flames died  down he got out and asked me what I thought
I said, I meant the cigarette, not you.~

To be my friend, respect my sacred space
Do not conquer me, we’re not at war.
Knowing this, we both receive kind grace

Love, not power, is shared by an embrace
Without this care, we will not come  near
To being friends, respecting sacred space

To love and gaze upon one holy face
To be accepted without selfish fears
To know all this, is in itself a grace.

To be connected, loving  is a state.
We must respect, be near but not too near.
Becoming friends makes a new sacred space.

The first and also last is each dear face
Where we gaze, deciphering what endured
To realise this, is in itself a grace

So life itself diseased, seeks out a cure
If we ignore what glitters, what allures
To be my friend, respect my sacred space
I am me, myself , let us save  face

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/nov/05/art-and-soul-how-sparking-creativity-helps-you-stay-well

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/nov/05/art-and-soul-how-sparking-creativity-helps-you-stay-well