1.Become  even more self centred and never listen to a person who is talking to you
2.Never have a shower or bath,Do not change your clothes  more than once a week.
3.Make your bed with dirty sheets and scatter used  tissues on the floor.Have pillows  with no  cases,
4 Never remember a  person’s name
5.Shudder if a potential  lover holds your hand
6.Boast as much as possible.
7.Argue about Brexit.
8.If people are atheists tell them  they are damned and if they are religious attack them as naive and evil killers.
9 Talk admiringly of Trump all day
10.Say Cain was right to kill Abel.
11.Keep going to the loo so much that nobody else can go
12 Get drunk and be sick on the carpet

First we are  one,then two,then one sometimes
When we love another human kind
Or lost  and grasped by mystic work sublime

Ironically we must lose to find
Absorbed in writing,there’s another mind
First we’re  one,then two,then one  at times

A gift, a word, a phrase a new wrought rhyme
With growing work,our minds are  furnished fine
We’re  swimming  in the mystic seas sublime

We dive into the depths, we rise,we dream
Add to our creations, line by line
First we’re  one,then two,then one  at times

The journey of the heart has major claims
Tempests,rages,do not love define;
We’re  making it  in mystic seas sublime.

Those who see not beauty must be fined
Criminals to Nature, cruel  before,behind.
We’re  all one,our human souls aligned;
To loose  and find, by mystic work we’re claimed

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/13/carol-ann-duffy-poems-ageing

“Peter Porter, whose Better Than God was shortlisted for last year’s Forward prize, has spent a lifetime making the difficult dazzle on the page. Fleur Adcock is one of the most formally skilled poets of our time and, along with Feinstein, Fainlight and Anne Stevenson, provided a role model for women poets at a time when sexism and tokenism were nastily predominant. Clarke is a tireless evangelist for poetry and founded Ty Newydd, the Welsh writers’ centre, one of the most idyllic places in the UK for studying poetry in week-long courses. Anthony Thwaite and Alan Brownjohn share her sense of altruism, sitting on committees that give awards or support to much younger poets. Linda Chase runs the flourishing Poetry School in Manchester. Maureen Duffy, well known as a novelist, has always kept poetry close to the centre of her writing life. To see Nina Cassian perform her poetry is awe-inspiring. Gerda Mayer and Lotte Kramer are fine poets who should be better known.

I invited the poets here to write, in any way they chose, about ageing. Our society, I believe, is turning gradually away from its obsession with “yoof” and “slebs”. We are beginning to realise that we face, at the very least, an uncertain future, one in which wisdom and experience – and respect – will need to be accorded a more important role. A good place to start is to read and listen to some of our most distinguished poets and, through them, to assert the importance of poetry in our culture. As poet laureate, it is a privilege to say to these poets, on behalf of their readers and the poets who follow on from them, a loud thank you.”

1.You are not unique,They may  treat everyone the same.They possibly have OCD
2.You keep doing stupid things.
3.They hate you and consider you should change to suit them.Or they need a scapegoat
4 They love you.
5.They are too shy to praise you.
6 They  think you are a foreigner because you have a Geordie accent,light hair and blue eyes.So you are  Polish.They may ask you if you have packed your suitcase.Do not reply.Just hand them a stamped, addressed envelope.

1.Get undressed  especially if you wear elasticated, skinny jeans which are hard to remove.
2 Have a bath
3.Make sure you know their name.
4 Put the cat out or….
5.If you have sex in the garden,put the cat in!
6.Grow a thick hedge in the garden as while it is growing it gives you time to find a lover gay or miserable.

Don’t let them take any photos unless you are married [ to them]

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-mindful-self-express/201408/the-30-most-common-reasons-people-might-criticize-you

1. They feel insecure and are overcompensating.
2. They think you are making them look bad in front of others.
3. They feel criticized by you and are counter-attacking.
4. They think they are genuinely helping you by giving you the benefit of their wisdom or experience.
5. They have strong opinions on a subject (e.g., politics, religion etc.) and see other points of view as less valid.
6. They are trying to get your attention or connect with you but lack skills, so they end up whining (e.g., kids, teenagers)

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/18/does-poetry-matter/poetry-is-hospitable-to-strangeness-and-surprise

“You may want something “practical,” so I’ll say this: poetry and science are kin; they share a series of principal labors. Those are 1.) observation and attention 2.) reflection and memory 3.) description 4.) imagination 5.) re-seeing and discovery. Both disciplines cultivate curiosity and interrogation.

Moreover, both disciplines are highly hospitable to strangeness and surprise. We don’t acknowledge this enough in science. We aren’t taught to enjoy this enough in poetry.

We don’t have to do much to make poetry “more relevant.” We just have to let science and poetry grow and change as they do. We just have to give them enough space and support to work in solitude but talk together too.”

You revealed the face within your face
Human, lowly, humbler than an ant
The pathos in your eyes made sad my gaze
The other face, defended, has no grace
With it , you appear quite confident.
Yet you revealed to me your hidden face
I know so well the suffering of your days
A fear of tragic pasts feared imminent
The pathos in your eyes made sad my gaze
The mental torment heavy all your days.
Yet you must hide from men intolerant
You revealed the face within your face
Like martyrs, you were tortured and disgraced
You wandered feebly, lost, itinerant
The pathos in your eyes makes sad my days
If Love exists then would that not embrace
The lost, the lonely, even the vagrant?
You revealed the face within your face
The pathos in your eyes made me feel base

My doctor is a merry fellow now
He is Hindhu so he can’t eat cow
I asked him if he likes to think
His eyes gave such a mighty blink
I still would like to ask him where and how.

His son has joined him  and they make a team
There  is a lady doctor to whom I have oft been
But I prefer a nature cure
And grass has such a great allure
The lawn tastes  wonderfully green

Soon  they will give me a jab for flu
They do not tell me what they plan to do
He crept behind me, seized my arm.
Fortunately ,I felt calm
So then he stuck the needle in with glue.

I try to go there only  if I’m dead
They can resurrect me from my bed
I find some doctors  can be kind
But sometimes  they affect my mind
And once it happened, so I stood and fled.

I was so kind I let sharks bite my legs
I let the swordfish cut my skin
I  let my  cats hunt for clothes pegs

I gave help to all who  had begged
But one of them sat down in my bin
I was so kind I let sharks bite my legs.

I made myself walk over eggs
And paid children to bring me old tin
I  let my cats play with clothes pegs.

A man  told me he wished I were dead
I decided to live without him
I was so kind I let sharks bite my legs.

My heart felt like a  pellet of lead
So I kicked this man on both his shins
I  let my cats play with clothes pegs.

I will put out the cruel in my bin
And let God decide if they sinned
I was so kind I gave sharks scrambled eggs
I  let my  cats dance with clothes pegs

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/body/diet-nutrition/a3137/blender-recipes/

Flour free cakes made with a blender.

Reflecting on  a leaf that lies alone,
Cut off the shrub or tree by wilful wind,
May touch a heart which now feels like a stone.

Beneath our generous flesh there lie our bones
Within a skeleton, a heart we find,
Reflecting on  a leaf that lies alone

From our lungs, we hear pathetic groans
As all the certainties once strong become untied
Then our hearts will feel like cold,  cold stones.

Yet on a kinder wind, red  leaves are borne
And left renewed in places more than kind
Food for ants, no more to lie alone

Inside my heart, an emptiness now yawns
But  like a womb, with rich velvet it’s lined
In truth, a heart is no kin to a stone.

To the dust and ash leaves are consigned
For a former neighbour do they pine?
Reflecting on  a leaf that lies alone
Will touch a heart no longer a cold stone.

Emile woke Mary up at 7am.It was a  Sunday in October, grey and damp.
Go away, she told him.The clock has changed.It’s not 8 am yet.I have to wash my hair as well.Get the Observer out.
I can’t read. the dear animal replied.And why don’t you rebel and stick to Summer Time
I know Stan wanted to send you to Eton but we couldn’t afford it.Yet you understand days and calenders, Mary joked
I can make myself some hot toast, Emile remarked boastfully.
You’ve never eaten it, she murmured fondly
Well, I want to.Let me try it!With butter.
Mary got up and found her fleece dressing gown; it was  brown and covered in coloured spots.She went downstairs and gave Emile a whole kipper.Then she made some tea and took it upstairs so she could drink it while she came round from her dreams
Suddenly Annie ran into  the room wearing a  long black vinyl coat and  red knee-high boots
You never locked the back door, she howled like a wild  leopard which has had no breakfast
I don’t suppose anyone wants my old TV as it is only 19 inches.And my Chromebook is not something worth re-selling.I do have a new coat.
How about Ray Monk’s life of Wittgenstein, Annie asked her defiantly, her apricot lips pouting childishly as the Riemann of Paris lipstick glittered uncannily
The people who might enjoy reading it are by virtue of that , not the sort to steal or buy it on the black market.
That is very racist, Annie told her.You should say. the beige market!
Then nobody would know what I meant, Mary said lovingly
Anyway, do you want to come to Marks with me?They have some lovely coats in
I’d like a pink wool coat, said Mary.
Quite right ,said Annie.Bring back feminine colours
Actually, gay men might like pink coats, she continued.But if they go on the bus they might get dirty.Come to think of it,so will women’s coats
They will have to buy pink puffa jackets and we can wash them at 30 deg.Mary whispered
Using a special detergent, Annie asked?
I have never seen a detergent for washing gay men.I don’t think they will fit into the washing machine.On the other hand, you are small so you will fit in
Shall I get undressed first, Annie asked furtively.
Yes, I’ll try to put you on a rapid wash for 15 minutes but it is your choice.Maybe a bath would be safer?
No problem, said Annie intellectually.Are you having one with me?
You#d better be careful, Mary ad-libbed.It might be sexual harassment.
Well, I am not gay , said Annie.
You never know till you try, Mary giggled ,like a child behind the school canteen
Why, we might become gender fluid and then who knows?
And so say all of us
Miaow,

When the pain of grief is wakened up
And sorrow falls  down like a winter storm
Avoid another’s careless talk and lip.

As we struggle to control our ship
Fearing to be injured, suffer harm
Alas, the pain of grief can waken up.

With endurance, we must be equipped.
And  we must take in both love and balm
Avoid the others’ careless talk and lip.

In our deepest souls, a  wound is ripped
Most soothing  is the singing of the psalms
When the pain of grief is wakened up

By a  rock, an avalanche is tipped
Destroying those who’re trapped within its arms
Avoid the other’s wicked open lips.

By humility, our pain’s disarmed
Being nothing, nothing can do harm
When the pain of grief is wakened up
Do not drink the bitter final cup.

We speak in cliches yet we do not know.
The clock change makes us grumble every year,
We say we hate dark nights and   winter snow

If we were original, what show!
The unacknowledged boredom makes us swear,
We speak in cliches but we do not know.

Oh, lovers and strength lost deal many blows.
And life itself will at frail bodies tear
Then we say we hate dark nights and snow

While we’re  living, we will undergo
The changes of the seasons and the years
We speak in cliches; we’re afraid to know.

We have gifts  yet we each suffer blows
Like all  creation, we might live with flair
Though we hate dark nights, the ice, the snow

Inside dwells our soul both frail and bare
Despite its lack, with it we love, revere
We speak in cliches, still afraid to know.
We  reproach the low down sun and snow

http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/poems/nature.shtml

(Felled 1879)

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering
weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew –
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

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Hopkins’ moral maze

I look up our small street,
To see if you are coming.
I don’t know what time it is,
But I think I hear you humming.

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

“Students can learn how to utilize grammar in their own writing by studying how poets do—and do not—abide by traditional writing rules in their work. Poetry can teach writing and grammar conventions by showing what happens when poets strip them away or pervert them for effect. Dickinson often capitalizes common nouns and uses dashes instead of commas to note sudden shifts in focus. Agee uses colons to create dramatic, speech-like pauses. Cummings of course rebels completely. He usually eschews capitalization in his proto-text message poetry, wrapping frequent asides in parentheses and leaving last lines dangling on their pages, period-less. In “next to of course god america i,” Cummings strings together, in the first 13 lines, a cavalcade of jingoistic catch-phrases a politician might utter, and the lack of punctuation slowing down and organizing the assault accentuates their unintelligibility and banality and heightens the satire. The abuse of conventions helps make the point. In class, it can help a teacher explain the exhausting effect of run-on sentences—or illustrate how clichés weaken an argument.

Yet, despite all of the benefits poetry brings to the classroom, I have been hesitant to use poems as a mere tool for teaching grammar conventions. Even the in-class disembowelment of a poem’s meaning can diminish the personal, even transcendent, experience of reading a poem. Billy Collins characterizes the latter as a “deadening” act that obscures the poem beneath the puffed-up importance of its interpretation. In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” he writes:  “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it./They begin beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means.””

“There’s something else in my past that I only recently realized contributed to my perseverance in writing poems, and that is my love of chess. I was taught the game in wartime Belgrade by a retired professor of astronomy when I was six years old and over the next few years became good enough to beat not just all the kids my age, but many of the grownups in the neighborhood. My first sleepless nights, I recall, were due to the games I lost and replayed in my head. Chess made me obsessive and tenacious. Already then, I could not forget each wrong move, each humiliating defeat. I adored games in which both sides are reduced to a few figures each and in which every single move is of momentous significance. Even today, when my opponent is a computer program (I call it “God”) that outwits me nine out of ten times, I’m not only in awe of its superior intelligence, but find my losses far more interesting to me than my infrequent wins. The kinds of poems I write—mostly short and requiring endless tinkering—often recall for me games of chess. They depend for their success on word and image being placed in proper order and their endings must have the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate.

Of course, it is easy to say all this now. When I was eighteen years old, I had other worries. My parents had split up and I was on my own, working in an office in Chicago and attending university classes at night. Later on, in 1958, when I moved to New York, I led the same kind of life. I wrote poems and published a few of them in literary magazines, but I didn’t expect that any of that activity would amount to much. People I worked with and befriended had no inkling that I was a poet. I also painted a little and found it easier to confess that interest to a stranger. All I knew with any certainty about my poems is that they were not as good as I wanted them to be and that I was determined, for my own peace of mind, to write something I wouldn’t be embarrassed to show my literary friends. In the meantime, there were other more pressing things to attend to, like getting married, paying the rent, hanging out in bars and jazz clubs, and every night before going to bed baiting the mousetraps in my apartment on East 13th Street with peanut butter.”

Why I Still Write Poetry

Nine years since my sister died
Eight years since getting a computer

Eight years living with my Father also alive.
Seven years of writing poetry
Seven years in grammar school
Six years in primary school
Five years for GCE study
Four years piano lessons
Three years  doing my degree and three years being at home before entering nursery school
Two years doing A  and S levels and in Nursery school [ not at the same time]
One year plus studying cello
Less than one year of being unable speak in sentences and hence being allowed or able to be a baby.

http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/nonsense/english/e_nons

“See-saw, Margery Daw,
Sold her bed and lay upon straw.
Wasn’t she a silly slut
To sell her bed and lie upon dirt?

It may be that there was once a real person called Margery Daw, and perhaps there was even a Dobbin who somehow came into the story. When Shakespeare makes Edgar in King Lear quote “Pillicock sat on Pillicock hill”, and similar fragments, he is uttering nonsense, but no doubt these fragments come from forgotten ballads in which they once had a meaning. The typical scrap of folk poetry which one quotes almost unconsciously is not exactly nonsense but a sort of musical comment on some recurring event, such as “One a penny, two a penny, Hot-Cross buns”, or “Polly, put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea”. Some of these seemingly frivolous rhymes actually express a deeply pessimistic view of life, the churchyard wisdom of the peasant. For instance:

Solomon Grundy,
Born on Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
And that was the end of Solomon Grundy.

which is a gloomy story, but remarkably similar to yours or mine.

Until Surrealism made a deliberate raid on the unconscious, poetry that aimed at being nonsense, apart from the meaningless refrains of songs, does not seem to have been common. This gives a special position to Edward Lear, whose nonsense rhymes have just been edited by Mr R. L. Megroz, who was also responsible for the Penguin edition a year or two before the war. Lear was one of the first writers to deal in pure fantasy, with imaginary countries and made-up words, without any satirical purpose. His poems are not all of them equally nonsensical; some of them get their effect by a perversion of logic, but they are all alike in that their underlying feeling is sad and not bitter. They express a kind of amiable lunacy, a natural sympathy with whatever is weak and absurd. Lear could fairly be called the originator of the limerick, though verses in almost the same metrical form are to be found in earlier writers, and what is sometimes considered a weakness in his limericks — that is, the fact that the rhyme is the same in the first and last lines — is part of their charm. The very slight change increases the impression of ineffectuality, which might be spoiled if there were some striking surprise. For example:

There was a young lady of Portugal
Whose ideas were excessively nautical;
She climbed up a tree
To examine the sea,
But declared she would never leave Portugal.

It is significant that almost no limericks since Lear’s have been both printable and funny enough to seem worth quoting. But he is really seen at his best in certain longer poems, such as “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” or “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bт”:

On the Coast of Coromandel,
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bт.
Two old chairs, and half a candle
One old jug without a handle
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,
These were all the worldly goods
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bт,
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bт.

After Mass on Sunday Mary decided to visit Stan, her elderly, gentle and frail husband in the Rehabilitation Unit where he had been sent recently by a strange physiotherapist…He was unhappy as the diuretics made him pee even more often than he used to do and he got very worried about it because his bad heart made it extremely hard for him to walk.
When she went into the small four bed ward she saw Stan sitting on his chair without any pyjama trousers on even though it was visiting time from 3 to 8 pm.
Why has he no trousers on? Mary asked a nurse angrily, her singularly blue eyes full of unshed glistening tears which almost washed off her turquoise mascara and made runnels in her honey beige foundation by Rimmel of London and Paris
He keeps wanting to go to the toilet so it’s easier for us all if he has no pants on, the nurse told her haughtily.He’s on diuretics, you see as he has water in his lungs and other inner organs and the water has to be removed from his body, Sheila ,the nurse announced in a cold voice
What about the lack of dignity in baring him to the world, Mary enquired softly yet piercingly her eyes dripping tears again.
Dignity ,what’s that? the nurse said insolently.He is just a pest. And old men don’t deserve any attention.We are tired of them.They should all die now.That’s government policy it appears
Emile who had hidden in Mary’s old, but good olive green Radley leather handbag let out a sound like a banshee in Cork or a demon in a nightmare.
The nurse looked quite frightened
What’s that? she whispered to Mary behind her hand.
It’s probably Satan coming to say ” hello” to you as you seem very wicked to me.Mary informed her politely yet honestly in her Northern way.
Oh my,what shall I do? the nurse asked in a trembling voice.I am so upset now.
You could try reading the Ten Commandments, Mary riposted jocosely… if it’s not too late.
Or recalling the Golden Rule………
I’ve never heard of the golden rule, said the nurse.Is it a measuring instrument of some unusual type?
Yes,in a sense it is, Mary said.It measures us by our compassion towards others.And you seem to have none for Stan.Can you not imagine what it’s like being a man sitting half naked in a public room with no recourse?
What’s a recourse, Sheila, the nurse, asked her thoughtfully,Is it a garment like a dressing gown?
No,it’s a a source of help in a difficult situation.It’s a remedy or an option
I have a higher degree in nursing,Sheila boasted stupidly.
I don’t care if you have a doctorate in nursing and philosophy,Mary cried.It’s what you do and say to the patients that counts.And going to an evening class in English would do you no harm.Your vocabulary is limited,to say the least.And words are useful whatever job you do.Or even if you are unemployed it helps you deal with bureaucrats
Oh,dear,said the nurse,I am sorry for being so thoughtless.I am always thinking about sex,love and clothes instead of the patients.I see now I have fallen into evil ways and hope I can improve a little.
You have been cruel, said Mary.And seeing my aged husband like this is breaking my heart.
She went over to Stan and sat by him.He fell against her bosom hungrily.Alas it was not for erotic reasons.His blood sugar was only 2 and his BP was 60/40.He was dying there with no trousers on and with no-one but Mary to help him… and Emile, their small intelligent black cat ,of course.Unfortunately Emile’s trousers were too small for Stan

.Mary wrapped a bath towel around Stan and held him in her arms.
Stan tried to speak but Mary could not make out what he was saying.Tears ran down her beautiful lined and wrinkled face and dripped onto Stan’s head.I suppose one might say it was a kind of baptism by love.Now Stan will soon be entering a new dimension and will be given a new and better name by One who cannot be named here.But you catch my drift?

Judgement is mine says the Lord.

Stan collapsed, his face went black.Only then was he sent to a real hospital with full equipment.He died, looking happy, the next day.His last words
“So many lovely friends”
Emile was crying on Mary’s lap.
Don’t worry Emile.He was very unhappy.
So am I, Emile wept
Then Mary wept herself.What a pity Emile is a cat and so cannot embrace the person he calls “Mother”

My head is reeling and my nails all broke
To rip the backs off phones is not for blokes.
If this goes on, my ears will start to smoke

I see a man  I fancy, by the oak
I’m jiggered so I wonder, will he cope?
My hair is looking wild, my nails all broke.

It might be an ash, don’t worry folks
I’ll tie myself to this one with a rope
If this keeps on, my ears will burn and smoke

When I was younger, no-one sold  me coke
I don’t need drugs, hallucinations gawp!
My hair is looking wild, my nails all broke.

Cats may mew and frogs might want to croak
All I want are books  or I shall mope
If life keeps up, my ears will start to smoke

How much is the rail fair up to Stoke?
How much does one pay for Chanel soap?
My hair is looking  golden  in this light

I think this villanelle was unprovoked
As a tactic, it may be mistake
My head is reeling and my nails all broke
If this goes on, my I will want to  smoke