My heart  is cracked like almonds are in cakes
Often  they are bought already  ground
I hope that no-one here intends to bake.

I used to see small cakes with almond flakes
In the days of pence, shillings, and pounds
My heart  is cracked like almonds are in cakes

But every heart  has got its  many cracks
Every person suffers from life’s wounds
I hope that noone here intends to bake.

And many hearts have been by fake love  broke
Yet vulnerable and human we resound
We cover up our hearts with a thick cloak

Some are givers, some can only take
Both are needed when we make a friend
I hope that someone here intends to bake.

Some are rigid and can never bend
Some are agile and will always blend
My heart  is cracked like almonds are in cakes
I hope that you won’t  use me if you bake.

An email got into my Inbox thanking me for giving them things to sell.I have not done so.It was also mentioning Gift Aid.However it was sent from the USA.

Do we laugh at human sacrifice,
Think we are superior,more advanced?
Abraham to offer Isaac was advised
We kill millions, into war entranced

Once it was the king’s beloved son
Who was burned up at the Harvest feast
To placate the gods, and make the crops grow on
Later humans offered a mere beast

We may put one coin into a box
This is not an offering till it hurts
We see no more the sheep and goats in flocks
Abstract living. abstracts less from  purse

Are these Wars a hidden offering?
The best  die as   our demons wildly sing

I’ve climbed out of that hole  that gobbled me
But here I stand still looking out for you
I feel myself and so I want to see
The face of my beloved  in my view.

My head turns round as if I am unsure
Who  or what I need to come to me
I    crawled  in mud ,and feared I’d not endure
The climbing and the hopeless victory

I see an empty world except for God
It’s   humans who  are dead,mislaid our souls
God told me I was loved, that I was good
He says he  created humour for the proles

The power of loss is  savage and complete
We turn to lowness   till we are replete

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/26/rupi-kaur-poetry-canada-instagram-banned-photo

“The book was re-released in October 2015. The book climbed bestseller lists, earning Kaur an audience far beyond those she had captured through social media. “Which is so weird,” she says. “How does a 50-year-old white woman relate to this?”

The reach of her writing hit her at a reading in San Francisco last year. As she neared the bookstore she saw a long line that snaked down four blocks and realised the crowd was there to see her. “That was the moment that I was like wow, this is crazy. It’s going to be crazy. It’s been that way since, which is really cool.”

No longer did it feel like she was casting her poetry into the vast online world and waiting to see if anyone would notice. Now it felt like the world was watching as Kaur, the child of Indian immigrants to Canada, sought to find her place using an unconventional recipe of poetry and social media.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g6rpXFqjcklyq0pwH7GNnV/philip-pullman-s-five-tips-for-writing?intc_type=promo&intc_location=news&intc_campaign=philippullmanwritingtips&intc_linkname=radio4_fac_article

Ignore the market and write what you want

Publishers will be very keen to tell you to a write specific type of book, namely something similar to the current literary craze or bestseller. Write what you want to write, be the next big thing and not another iteration of a phase that will pass. People don’t know what they want to read until they actually start.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/20/kayaker-saves-life-lost-iguana-swimming-four-miles-sea/

When you write you find you are a different person than you believed you were.The topics I find coming up in my poems are worms,dust,earth,ashes,snails,blindness of human beings, humour,funny ideas,creativity,snails,tree roots and  the world we cannot see yet depend on,the value of love,creativity,death,loss

This is not what I expected

The driver of the  bus lives far away
His home is mobile,but not smart like our phones
He lives in a small caravan, he says
Yet of all the drivers he’s the one.

He always waits till I ,crippled, sit down
Advised me to sit until he stops
He has a smile and rarely makes a frown
Though sometimes in his words some anger’s wrapped.

Alas, he unsurprisingly believes
That all the money goes to foreign folk
By the tabloid press he is deceived
Yet due to pain, his  hidden fires must smoke

The least men are the kindest to the weak
Believe me,I know well what I  here speak

When true love’s gone and doom hangs over head

When life runs like a river to the sea

Then shall I take new lovers to my bed?

And with their carnal touch consoled be?

When my love lies,so breaks my tender heart.

When life seems grey and rocks bestrew my path.

Then, shall I my life of evil start?

And on the world shall I bestow my wrath?

When true love lies and wrecks all loyalty.

When puzzlement makes all my world seem mad.

Then I shall upend causality

And let myself do deeds which make me glad.

For I have love’s sweet child inside my soul

And I shall tend her till at last she’s whole

The gravity of loss brought me to earth
Beneath the rotting leaves, I lay with worms.
I wondered if I were of any worth

No more to be enchanted by love’s mirth,
I  with unnamed particles was turned.
The weight of loss bears down the heart to earth.

I could not rise alone but saw a path
While I slept  new unity had formed
I learned I need not think of what I’m worth

My sorrow brought no guilt nor fear of wrath
I am both  eagle and  a twisted worm
In my little grave, I  loved the earth.

Like the adder, shocked into rebirth.
I from silent underworld had learned
Not to judge my soul to be of worth.

I shall not  fear the flames of hell that burn
When blackness is accepted, may one learn?
The weight of loss breaks down the soul to earth
With dusty shredded leaves, we then converse

Blogging about God has created a problem for me

“We are not in God’s hands.  We are God’s hands.  It is our job to take this world as we find it and make it better.  In general, I think those who are inspired by God are more active than others, but there are many, many exceptions.  Oxfam, my favorite charity, is thoroughly secular.

What is God doing in the meantime?  I like the answer ofCharles Hartshorne.  God rejoices in our joys, and sorrows in our sorrow.  Lots of people seem to think that a God like that is hardly worth worshiping.  My answer is that if you want a God of infinite might, then you are worshiping power, not goodness.

Jesus Christ

I’m a Christian, and so I’m expected to think that Christ was a great event in history.  I do, but not for the usual reasons.  Jesus Christ is not my personal savior (whatever that means), but I don’t think he was just a wise teacher either.  The story of Christ is the story of a God who allowed himself to become human and suffer as humans do in order that he might know more about us, his creation, and so that we can imagine a God who is not all powerful.  In other words, God became human so that he could know us, and we him.  If so, then basic human standards of good and evil must apply even to God.  It’s good to worship God because God is good. Just not all powerful.

Lots of people, probably the vast majority of Christians, believe that Christ was never fully human, for he performed many miracles.  The Nicene Creed says Christ was both fully human and fully God, which doesn’t really help. The Gospel of John treats Christ as though he was just pretending to be human.

What’s so great about Christ’s journey is his vulnerability, his willingness to be forsaken and humiliated as only a human can be.  The Old Testament, as Christians call it, has most of the great Bible stories, but the story of Christ is a really great story, particularly if we read it not primarily as a promise of salvation, but as a story about God’s limits.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46) Who could say this but a God torn in two, doubting even himself for a moment?  As all of us, including the most tenacious, have doubted God.  (Christ’s cry is not just a reference to Psalm 22; he was not teaching Bible studies.)”

You who with your serenading
Won my love and took my heart
Come now to the assignation
When   both you and I  shall part

You who with your humour loving
Gave affection and delight
Oh, now let me see you  coming
Just once more,to then depart

After birth and after losing,
We must grow without insight
Nothing knowing , nothing choosing
We are led to darkness bright.

Dear All

I have to write this as and when.I have just found I can do hundreds of courses free on Open Culture.So I shall not send any presents this year just a guide to which courses you might like.
Well.I went out this morning and caught the bus.Not in a fishing net,ahah.The driver was very nice.I can’t recall much more.Anyone Robert has asked me to buy some more makeup.Either that or he will leave home for ever.The problem is finding the right colour.The lady in Boots thought I was Ivory but it made me look like a ghost.So we settled on beige.Bloody beige.Pardon me,I hate beige but had to agree it covered up the many strange spots and marks I have acquired.If only Rob had bought me a silk pillow case 20 years ago,how different I might look.He said he’s never heard of them
I propose 2018  should be the year when all married men  or lovers are forced to study fabric,sheets, and other niceties.That will give me a chance to steal Rob’s tools and his models and see what I can invent.
To  give you more news,my son is going to Russia for a holiday.Better than the West Bank,ahaha.I hope.I see that WP uses the term Palestinian Territories as we have the honour of a couple of readers from there.I may write bad letters but it takes their minds off the Bedouins’ schools being razed to the ground,as it were.Why should Bedouins go to school? They were in the Negev before schools were invented.Oh,dear.
My daughter has just got a Ph.D in Anglo-Saxon.I wonder what  kind of job she will get? Serving in Lidl’s? Washing fruit in Holland.Who knows.Maybe she will publish her thesis and it will sell like Harry Potter.Though few people in Britain can understand Anglo-Saxon despite that they are English [ so they claim].So I guess she will have to write a novel about bondage like Shifty Shades of Mauve.I do like mauve very much.It looks lovely with my blue lips and eyes.I have a mauve dress and some pyjamas.I judge by what I see here in the Town that pyjamas are acceptable for shopping in when topped by a fake fur coat or a faux acrylic biker jacket.
I don’t know what my husband would think if I wore those kind of things.He bought me some blue tights once.He said there were no blue stockings.I was glad as I hate suspenders.
It was hell menstruating with those and the gigantic brown knickers with irremovable hard bits where blood refused to come out of the fabric.Of course, the Bishop forbade us to use tampax as we would lose out virginity.How daft can those men get?Alas,very daft indeed.How can a Bishop know what it’s like to bleeding menstruate when you have to hide all the rubbish till the men go out and then we had  rush in and put them on the fire.They didn’t do much good to the fire.I ask you! It shows that Christianity is nothing to do with Jesus.It’s concerned with blood,death,virginity and secrecy.What does that tell us? I don’t know either.It was hard washing those knickers and we only changed them once a week.In those days we still had pubic hair and as baths were bad for us,we could lie in bed picking off the dried blood clots unti day 7 when we had a bath.

I seem to have wandered away so I shall leave you here waiting for more thrilling feasts of words… look in the free dictionary.
I have to polish the kettle and kill some flies now.Then decide on my pudding. Yoghurt, tinned fruit or a walnut whip.Or rice pudding with raisins and cream set with gelatine in a mold and turned out onto a big plate.Until we eat it.It won’t last long here.Not like that boring old tinned custard and prunes.Who ever ate a prune willingly? The constipated pain wracked patient, that’s who
Cheers

Kristy and cat

Where do we draw the line, who has the power?
The man who offers actresses a role
If he can take them and their little flowers

Or is the  beauty of a woman  soured
If she thinks men ‘s behaviour rather droll?
Where do we draw the line, who has the power?

As from the magazines, dour faces glower.
As women all across the Western world shout “foul”
He can’t possess them or their glorious flowers

We like to blame the victims,girls not ours
They should beat men off with metal trowels
Where do we draw the line, who has the power?

And in the background, secret rapists cower
They live by proxy hearing victims howl
They can’t love  or  touch the  hidden flowers

All across the world, men like to prowl
If only they were dogs that merely growled.
Where do we draw the line, who has the power?
Here is the daftest man who self devours!

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46568/planetarium-56d2267df376c

Daily Telegraph:Hurricane Brian

There was a  programme on TV last year about the Jews who survived the Concentration Camps.One was a man  whose mother was about 17 when she was released.She married and he as born when she was 19.He’s been having psychotherapy for 40 years.
So we wonder can those few European Jews ever recover fron their collective trauma.Of course Jews had already been murdered  or massacred in many other places.
But from a different perspective,we might ask,have we the Europeans recovered from learning what evil we could do to  other human beings? Or have we repressed it? Certainly the Jews already in Britain were safe,Yet many were turned away,And Germany,France,  and other “highly civilised” countries seemed happy to ” cooperate ” with the Nazis.Surely we have not accepted  our guilt.Nor done much to come to understand how these things happen

I was taken aback,shocked, by hearing a friend say with relish, if the Muslims don’t watch out we will treat them like the Jews were treated.As if that were a good thing.
I think one factor is that many of us don’t know many Jews and even if we do, would  we talk like that?
Taking it at a  personal level, if we injure someone they have to recover in whatever way they can,but don’t we?To admit we have deliberately hurt someone is very  hard.And in doing that we have become a different person.To recover from our actions,how do we do that? Because we are harmed by doing harm to others.We don’t recover by mere Confession and Absolution.
Virtue is its own reward is more meaningful than we may  think.I find I do feel better if I don’t send the angry email  or if I refrain from gossip.We must not take it so far that we let others injure us, though,And boasting of our virtue is not a bright idea.
Has Europe ever recovered from a  century of wars and murder on a scale previously unimaginable? I think not.
Can it recover? I don’t know

https://www.bestvpn.com/wpa2-wifi-not-secure/

“Is It Time to Panic?

Yes and no. This is a very serious vulnerability, which affects almost every WiFi user. It makes all our data insecure and could be used by malicious actors to launch wide-scale disruptive attacks on online communities.

On the other hand, there are some silver linings:

• Attacks can be carried out only in close proximity to a WiFi network. The fact that remote attacks are not possible will necessarily limit the amount of damage that a malicious entity can do.
• Connections to HTTPS websites remain secure. This almost certainly means sensitive data such your bank details, online shopping details, and emails are secure.
• Connections protected by a Virtual Private Network (VPN) are secure.

It should also be noted that some devices are affected worse than others:

• Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) and Linux devices are particularly badly affected, as they’re also vulnerable to an additional bug. This results in the encryption key being rewritten to all-zeros, which makes it trivial to hack.
• Windows and iOS devices are the least badly affected because they implement WPA2 in a non-standard way (that, incidentally, violates the 802.11 standard).”

“

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. -Leonardo da Vinci

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/why-teaching-poetry-is-so-important/360346/

In M and S they have got full-length nightgowns with long sleeves and cowl necks.So it seems that while we can go out in jeans and T shirts, we will go to bed in what looks like a nun’s habit.~
I often wondered what was the habit of this nun?Biting her nails. beating  unmarried mothers? Going gambling in dens of iniquity?
Anyway, seems to me this nightdress would be just the thing to go to Tesco’s in if you waken up  at 3 am worried you have no cauliflower ears left in the house.
They also are selling cashmere dressing gown for £199.Seems like modesty and wealth are on the rise.You could have fooled me.I can tell you it’s cheaper to go to bed naked except it’s awkward if anyone rings the doorbell.
I wear a nightdress in summer and two in winter as I can’t have anything heavy on top of me like a thick duvet.
So if you have arthritis or you have no heater wear more clothes in bed.But not the ones you were to go out in.Some people wear thermal underwear in bed.Rather cruel if you sleep with a lover but you might find it turns them on and that will warm you up!
If they don’t like it ask them to buy you a cashmere and silk.That will be a test of love!
I can’t stay here writing all night.I have to wash up.
Cheers

How like a jail, this wooden cubicle
Where I am paid to sit and calculate.
Since my ambition was more musical
The lack I feel aids Satan and his mates

All day I enter figures into rows
Or into columns vertical and neat
The walls seem  nearer and I am disposed
To get my coat and race off down the street.

Yet I need the money  to pay rent
To buy my food and go to Southwold Pier
In truth it is like Hell and I am bent
By living as if nothing true were here.

I need to find the space in my own mind
Where dreams can linger till I am less blind

Before you send that email,stop and muse
Do not shoot the arrow poison tipped
Why so hurt a friend for differing views?

The vulnerable, the lonely,how we choose
To  pass the suffering on, in words encrypt
Before you send that email,stop and muse.

When we do evil, we our virtue lose.
See  mouths down-turned with narrow tensed up lips.
Why gravely hurt someone  with differing views?

You may have got a match,don’t light the fuse.
Might you be more  gentle,  less abrupt?
Before you send that email,pause to  muse.

Earth may burn and  human hearts may freeze
Does that mean that we must be corrupt?
We’ll stretch our minds instead to hear all views

Our dear heart,our own sin will corrupt
We will suffer  most from our descent
Before you send that email,stop and muse.
Why gravely hurt yourself when you can choose?

1.Listen properly when people talk to you.
2.Only talk about worthwhile or funny topics.
3.Never seek revenge or retaliation
4 Hug people if it is appropriate
5.Reveal,don’t hide, your love.
6.Remember people can’t read your mind
7 But your body language can often be read
8.Show respect to others.
9.Some people are hard to relate to and it is probably not entirely your fault.
10 Some people are too weak to apologise.Don’t be one of them.

Unnoticed is that moment seasons change
Summer heat seems vanished in  a day
The early darkness  startling,eerie, strange

From the golden sun sadly estranged
Grief descends , we miss our flowers and play
Unnoticed is that moment seasons change

The long days  give us time to take the stage;
Time to go out in the evening air.
The early darkness  strikes us, eerie, strange

Like a thrown ball  falls from height of range
A turning point for gravity  lives there,
Unnoticed is that moment seasons change

Now our seasonal clothing is exchanged
Out come hats and coats in colours grayed
The early darkness  seems  less eerie, strange

Oh, we cry, come back  those glorious days!
We’re like children,  who for sweeties pray.
In  a  single moment, seasons change
Into  darkness, our own sun is plunged