Are we bristling with an untold rage?
The  silence aches with menace  and  hot hair
I feel our minds and hearts are disengaged

Why do we blame God for our steel cage?
The glass around it mists with such despair.
Are we filled with old, unholy rage?

We don’t recognise the players on our stage
And what is worse, we feel we do not care,
As our minds and hearts are disengaged

The scriptwriter was not named on the page!
They told  it all  and left our feelings bare,
So we bristle with unruly rage.

Are we in need of ethical  triage,
Assessed by saints and demons of despair?
While our minds and hearts are disengaged

Would we were in  gardens, unknown, fair
As Leonard Cohen’s songs drowned out our fear
Are we condemned to tussle with our rage?
I sense our minds and hearts awry, dismayed.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/06/philosophers-are-hypocrites/392087/

“…..as the cliché goes, people don’t always practice what they preach—particularly in some professions. Take the police: when Florida’s Sun Sentinel examined the records of 3,915 officers who had traveled on toll roads in 2011, the paper found that nearly 800 of them had driven at speeds of 90 to 130 miles an hour, many either while off duty or in violation of department rules that barred excessive speeding even in emergencies. Or consider physicians: one study of 500 doctors found 38 percent of them to be overweight, versus 33 percent of American adults (to be fair, the doctors’ rate of obesity was lower) [1]. Or those in retail: according to the security company Checkpoint Systems, the people who steal most from North American stores aren’t shoppers, but employees.”

“Another study shows ethicists to be especially delinquent library patrons:compared with other philosophy texts, “contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy” were roughly 50 percent more likely to be permanently missing [3].”

Can the Ethical be Primary?

An extract:

“Ethics is kind of ‘in your face’ in a way that things-in-themselves are not.  You can start the ethical endeavor from someplace other than ontology – in experience perhaps.  It is possible that ethics is primary:  ‘What should I do?’ comes before ‘What is there?’

This question put me in the mind of Emmanuel Levinas, who I was studying for my dissertation prior to going from fully to partially examining my life. His Wikipedia entry has a nice succinct section on this point:

[Levinas’] work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas’ terms, on “ethics as first philosophy”. For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics (which Lévinas called “ontology“). Lévinas prefers to think of philosophy as the “wisdom of love” rather than the love of wisdom (the literal Greek meaning of the word “philosophy”). In his view, responsibility precedes any “objective searching after truth”.

Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person’s proximity and distance are both strongly felt. “The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness.”^[3] At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know one’s freedom, to affirm or deny.^[4] “

In short, the Other comes before any Object.  There is a sense in which this view makes a category claim about Others vs. Objects – they are wholly different.  This doesn’t entail that one is prior to the other (and I suspect that at some point Derrida probably deconstructed that opposition).  If we at least grant the distinction between the two, I read Mark’s comment as saying there are practical reasons for spending our energies on ethics instead of ontology and I am sympathetic to this view.  You can live your life never knowing what is-in-itself, but you will at some point in your life have to make a moral decision.  It’s worth giving that some thought.

Levinas’ ultimately will claim that responsibility for the Other is the foundation of our Subjectivity, taking Heidegger’s notion of Sorge (Care) to it’s logical conclusion with respect to other Dasein.  While I won’t claim to understand what Levinas is really all about, listeners have probably caught on to the fact that the Ethical is of much more interest to me than ontology.  Metaphysically or practically ethical questions take priority for me.”

I burned my bottom on a  plastic seat
My legs were aching so I just sat down
What a danger in this nauseous heat!

I gave a cry that sounded like a bleat,
Which caused the nearby folk to turn and frown
I burned my bottom on a  plastic seat

With cystitis, I felt rather weak
The  plastic fire  may help my bladder round
I might linger in this healing heat.

At least it will have dried up any leak
And thus the odour will my seers confound
I burned my bottom on a  plastic seat

What a way to end this furious week
If I were younger, I might feel let down
I’ll  have a smoke   to convey my conceit

Where are my tiara and my crown?
They are made of plastic like my gown
I burned my bottom on a  plastic seat
What a rude shock in this  fracking heat!

Eating in the garden in the rain
Denying what his senses felt and saw
November came and he crept in again

A look  of anguish with a heart so pained
He wished he were beyond the natural law.
Eating in the garden in the rain

Once we   were to weather quite immune
We lived as if our bodies had no flaw
November came and  we ate in again

I heard the blackbird spring its built in tune
Hoping that his misery would thaw
While eating in the house where it can’t  rain

To him the winter dark made very plain
We must eat indoors and find some joy
November comes and  we are home again

Every husband has at least  one flaw
And it ain’t what that damned butcher saw
Eating in the garden in the rain
Autumn comes and I still vote remain

Our roots are in another kind of earth
Invisible,  yet felt in guts and heart
Unlike the trees that bow down at our birth

Ignorant of our roots, now torn  and worse
We come to grief and all its  little parts.
Our roots are in another kind of earth

Our conception,  to the sperm, is merry mirth
The egg is eager for her life to start
Unlike the trees that, windy, flounce and curse.

We do not know what our deep roots are worth
Till sad we see our angels each depart
Our roots are in  some other kind of earth

We grow,enlarge, and learn a language first
Then in our home grown  narrative we star
Unlike the trees that bowed down at our birth

Creating love from endless tiny sparks
The form of every universe  must start.
Our roots are in another kind of earth
With fabled  trees entrancing every birth

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70212/learning-image-and-description

This is an extract from the above article

“A Few Ways to Begin

The poetic definition of the term image is broader than our everyday one, and this is important to emphasize: the poetic image is not just visual but an activation of any of the five senses. Although in our highly visual culture we tend to think of the visual by default, in fact some of the most evocative imagery engages the nose, the ear, the sense of touch or taste.

Another way teachers often present this subject is to discuss the appeal of showing (as opposed to telling or explaining) the object at hand. Again, in using the word “show” we are limited by the language of our culture—showing seems to refer to sight, but can also encompass other senses. In a poem one can show the sound of the neighbor’s cough, or the feel of the cotton of a lover’s shirt against the speaker’s face, or the smell of the pond in a Vermont town in winter. You can start by listing such sensory evocations, to become more aware of the imagery you come into contact with every day, as well as the images contained in, or as, your memories. Try this preliminary two-part exercise:

1. Sit in a public space for at least 30 minutes. Choose a place others are passing through (a school quadrangle, coffee shop, library, bus stop, etc.). Try to observe, using all five senses, what is happening around you. Record, in list form and in as much detail as possible, at least 20 different images that catch your attention.
2. Then, spending at least 30 minutes on your own in a quiet space, go inward. Think of strong sensory memories and try to capture—again in list form, and without worrying about providing explanatory context for a reader—those memories in language, conveying the strongest sensory details.

To take imagery deeper, and explore its potential for catalyzing new poems, you could expand upon the observation exercise above. For example, try taking one image from your observation and writing a page about it, not limiting yourself to what you see and hear and smell directly anymore, but allowing the sensory input to spark other thoughts, memories, images, story, and emotional weight. Robert Pinsky’s “Shirt” seems to do just this, beginning as it does with a physical examination of how a shirt is made: “The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, / The nearly invisible stitches along the collar …” We imagine the writer may actually be looking at a shirt as he begins writing this. But then the imagination takes over, and the shirt’s journey comes to life: “the collar / Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians / Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break.” By line 10 of the poem we are in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911. Then a jaunt through Scotland, and finally the modern-day factory in South Carolina where this shirt has received its inspection by someone named Irma (a detail we presume the speaker knew from finding the inspection sticker on the inside of the fabric). The poem takes us on a high-speed, higher-intensity whirl through history, reimagining its scenes, and ends back where it started, in close examination of this shirt’s physical features, but with new import: “the buttons of simulated bone, / the buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters / Printed in black on neckband and tail.””

When you are here,I feel his absence more
The empty cocoon, no one live within
Since he has gone,I wonder what life’s for

When you are gone,I  close the heavy door.
The silence supreme, glacial will begin.
When you are here,I feel his absence more

Without  his arms I feel I am estranged
Not his honey, not his little hin
Since he has gone,I wonder what I’m for.

I feel a hatred rising,dark, deranged.
Yet ,is there not that  Other deep within?
When you were here,I felt that absence more

We must grieve  and let our tears down pour
We fend off  bleak despair,  so cold, malign
Since  he is gone,I wonder what life’s for.

Is this love gone off a cancer or a sin?
May I hope the better side will win?
When you were here,I felt his absence more
Since he has gone,I wonder what I ‘m for.

https://www.happenstancepress.com/index.php/blog/entry/can-you-write-a-good-poem-fast

Extract:

‘Un poème n’est jamais fini, seulement abandonné. A poem is never finished, only abandoned.’ The words are Paul Valéry’s, though I first came across them elsewhere – quoted by Philip Larkin, I think.

Quote:

“There are circumstances in which poems arrive fast and finished. Re-reading some of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s darkest sonnets, and in particular ‘ I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’, I see James Reeves’ note at the back of my edition: ‘This and the three following sonnets are probably among those referred to in a letter to Bridges in which Hopkins says, Four of these came like inspirations unbidden and against my will.’ That sounds fast to me, although the final sonnets may be some way from their original manifestations.

Perhaps poems should be written in these conditions – only when they are inevitable. Much ink might be saved, and every poem would have the necessary ingredient of desperation in it. It would be something found, not something sought. True poems come into being at the top of an experience chain, as people and birds of prey are at the top of the food chain. But some links of the experience chain may be the writing of manufactured poems, or a poem hunt, and the dark night of the doggerel. Rubbish-writing and despair. It is necessary to work, providing one’s own waves of energy, until, suddenly, the poem is given. It may be a line or a word only, but it slots into place like a keystone, locking words together.”

…………..

“So there is a case for poems written fast, hurriedly, uncooked. They may be the necessary experiences in a chain.

James Reeves would not have agreed. He thought the hardest (but most important) thing for a poet was to know when not to write. In ‘What is it to be a poet?’ (in Commitment to Poetry, 1969), he says: ‘It is up to every poet to know his creative power, and not force it. I know mine to be small and I say this without complacency. I never cease to wish it were greater.’ And he goes on ‘One must accept the gift one has; one must accept the necessity for silence, for doing nothing; it is the hardest thing to be a poet and be unable to write poems.’”

Mary was sitting down feeling quite lonely in the waiting room outside the doctor’s office when she saw Emile her cat hiding under a chair..

What are you doing,she whispered.I’m glad of your company though.

I jumped into your cab, the cheeky cat informed her proudly

I want to be there when he examines you in case he makes vulgar remarks

Don’t worry,she answered,they always have a chaperone nowadays.

Just then a pretty young black nurse took Mary into a room and said to her

Take off your underpants!

I don’t wear underpants,said Mary,but I can go home and get my husband’s if you want me to.

We use underpants as a generic term,the nurse informed her in a kindly yet menacing voice.

Wow,they are so intelligent nowadays,I don’t think I knew what generic meant till recently Mary told herself stupidly

I have no underpants,Emile mewed. crossly

No and I am not making you any.I have quite enough washing to do already.Mary responded like a mother.

It’s not fair, said Emile.All my friends have underpants and T shirts too.

Soon the doctor came in and looked nervously at Mary and then at her female parts.

Mary was used to this but all of a sudden she got a nasty pain

Ow,ow,ow,she shrieked,what is that?

It’s ok,said the nurse,just old ladies are not used to this sort of thing.

I’ll have you know many older ladies are very used to it but not when they are unaroused.Besides men’s organs are kinder than metal or plastic if the lady is willing.Can’t you put more lubricant on the damned thing

The doctor tried to remove the speculum but was clearly somewhat agitated.

Ouch,cried Mary.Ouch.Ouch

Thank goodness I didn’t know it would hurt.Do you think we should be shown a romantic mildly arousing film in the waiting room to make it easier?

We can’t do that,said the nurse.We might be accused of running a brothel.Still we could use more money in here.

But the doctor is not paying me,said Mary.
I am paying him, in a sense,as a taxpayer.And you too,dear.

You are too clever for me,said the nurse sharply as she admired Mary’s tan leather handbag from TKMaxx stuffed with set squares and cameras

I shall bring a vibrator next time,Mary told her,though she had never even seen a vibrator except in a picture.Still.she had to say something.And why should she not benefit from modern science?Boots sell them,she seemed to recall…

You can’t bring a vibrator in here or the doctor will be angry ,as he might be accused of misconduct if you enjoyed yourself, the nurse whispered, though why should you not enjoy it,she said in a puzzled tone as if she had never thought like this before.

I thought it was only misconduct if he enjoyed himself,Mary cried loudly and plaintively

He has seen so many ladies, it is just like seeing into a mouth for him,said the nurse churlishly thus taking away Mary’s pride in her unique anatomy.

I expect one gets used to anything in time,Mary murmured,but I hope he will not need to do that again to me.

No, you seem ok,the doctor said,but I seem to imagine I can see a cat under the table.What is he doing?

I am just keeping an eye on you,mewed Emile.I live with Mary.

No animals are allowed in here ,the doctor shouted in a paranoid manner.

A bit late now,mewed the cat.Are you sending for the cat police

Dr.Grey picked up a very large speculum and threatened to strike Emile with it

Now then,said the nurse, he might scratch my legs.Leave him alone.He’s just protecting her.And I had just sterilised that.

Fat lot of good Emile was,Mary thought.

The doctor approached Mary and told her she would be seeing a consultant soon… in the meantime should she do anything to prepare… she asked.

Well, do try to relax if you can, he told her gently.It is trying for ladies of riper years to attend hospitals but we only want to help you.

I’ll have to help myself,Mary thought wryly, lauging inside as she got down off the table and put on her red and purple knickers or “underpants” as they are now referred to as.

Thank God,that is over,she whispered to Emile.Let’s run out and get a cab.

She hobbled to the door and phoned the taxi firm with her mobile.I just want to get home she told the driver.

Don’t we all, he said in an Eton accent.Surely it’s not David Cameron in disguise canvassing patients?Thank God he’s not conducting pelvic exams on them!That would lose him the election whether he was any good or not… in my view,but then what do I know about the British electorate?It might be the key to our future as a nation.Think about it! Now we know it’s worse than in 2015 for sure
And so say all of us

Well,I’ve been out and collected some new computer spectacles.Since I’ve been ill for 2 weeks I wasn’t able to go before.They are wonderful.A big help to someone with visual problems.They are sometimes known as office glasses,apparently.
Then I had to have a SIM card blocked as I lost a phone.So I’ve been busy without really doing anything.The weather is so cold my feet are numb.I am putting the heating on.The air from the Carribean has not arrived.Yet!
I  hope summer is not over for us so soon.Still,we adapt.I am now trying to make a Voice Tablet work and might hit it with a stick in a minute.It is frozen but no oven will thaw it out

I never knew what winking really meant
Especially if from someone soon to die.
Everyone said my husband was a gent

We  never spent a hot week in a tent
But on the shore we loved to read and lie.
I never knew what winking really meant

He used to pray but seldom during Lent
He did not like the eye of God to pry
Everyone said my husband was a gent

When we met he said I was a saint
But little did he know that I’m a spy
I never knew what blinking really meant

In his arms, I felt I’d  like to faint
But I cannot faint  near ICI
All agree my husband was a gent

His dad was ICI’s astonishment
In Billingham asthmatics  used to cry
I never knew before what stinking  meant

If he died no-one could pay the rent
So mother used to keep him nice and dry
All agree  my husband really spent

If he had to die then so do I
But I have other fish I long to fry
I never knew what winking really meant.
But does it matter since he was a gent?

https://www.udemy.com/beginners-guide-to-writing-poetry/

Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitic Legacy—500 Years Later

Quote

The 500th anniversary, which numerous conferences, museum exhibits and special events and publications are commemorating throughout 2017, has a much darker significance for Jews. While Martin Luther initially had a relatively positive relationship with German Jews, he eventually adopted vociferously anti-Jewish rhetoric and promoted violence against Jews. His views helped shape centuries of anti-Semitic attitudes in Western Europe, and the Nazis later used his writing to stir up anti-Jewish sentiment.

Now dress is to be gender free at last
And fluidly the boundaries shall run
Wear some leaves like Eve and  smoke the grass

Watch the  legs of maidens as they pass
Eating apples,having lots of fun
Now dress is to be gender free at last

Every rule  is broken and debased
The police are armed and we can smell the guns
Wear some leaves like Eve and  smoke the grass

Let the memory of our loves be not erased
As rapidly the rules melt with sense none
So dress is to be gender free at last

Let not our heart’s love be torn, defaced
Let us live with humour and wisdom
Wear some leaves like Eve and  mow the grass

Is our Big Society a con?
Clothes are not important to the Sun
Now dress is to be gender free at last
Wear some leaves like Eve and   break the glass.

Ah,did you throw away the ripened fruit
Because inside it hid a hardened stone?
As anything not total does not suit
Love’s ambivalence seems to you a crime.

Confirm yourself by getting a phone text
You cannot live today without that cell
When I was young , the  Bishop confirmed best

Do you wonder if you’re a mite obsessed
Well if you are, perhaps noone else can tell
Confirm you’re me by getting a phone text

Do you think  that I  have passed a test
To prove I’m real and feeling really swell?
Then I was told , the  Bishop confirmed  least

My mother always  seemed inclined to vex
And added further children to our hell.
Confirm yourself by sending you a text

I wonder if we had too many checks
I suffered with my” nerves” when Mother yelled
When lips were cold , the  Bishop  preferred breasts.

Well soon I shall find what cometh next
The priest was absent from my burial
Confirm all first by sending God a text

So then we hear the tolling of the knell
Elegaic music with dark thrills
Confirm yourself by reading holy texts
When I  sung , the  Bishop cried “Arrest.”

Old wall by Katherine

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/111710/when-i-connect-via-usb-android-to-pc-it-automatically-starts-charging-how-do

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-housden/importance-of-poetry_b_884319.html

“Poems are necessary because they honor the unknown, both in us and in the world. They come from an undiscovered country; they are shaped into form by the power of language, and set free to fly with wings of images and metaphor. Imagine a world in which everything is already known. It would be a dead world, no questions, no wonder, no other possibility. That’s what my own world can feel like sometimes when my imagination has gone into retreat. I have discovered that poetry is the phoenix I can fly on to return to that forgotten land.

And yet for all its magic, poetry uses the common currency of our daily speech. It uses words that are known to all of us, but in a sequence and order that surprises us out of our normal speech rhythms and linear thought processes. Its effect is to illuminate our lives and breathe new life, new seeing, new tasting into the world we thought we knew. Poetry bids us eat the apple whole.

To eat the apple of the world whole, we have to learn to pay attention; not only to the inner promptings of the imagination, but to the physical world around us. Poetry is a way of rescuing the world from oblivion by the practice of attention. It is our attention that honors and gives value to living things, that gives them their proper name and particularity; that retrieves them from the obscurity of the general. Poems that galvanize my attention shake me awake. They pass on their attentiveness, their prayerfulness, to me, the reader. And especially when I read them aloud, and shape the sounds on my lips and the rhythms on my breath. This is why poetry can make us more fully human, and more fully engaged in this world.”

I have walked the silent paths of grief
Sunless,dreary,cold and all alone.
I have slept on beds of winter leaves.

I feel that death’s a cruel,mysterious  thief.
Although my heart weeps and my joy has gone,
I have never felt I was deceived.

I have learned that human life is brief.
I have learned by sorrow we’re undone.
I  have sifted earth and what’s beneath.

I have felt my dark emotions seethe
While I'm cruelly mocked by glaring sun.
I have learned the geography of grief.

I wait in patience for my life to cease.
Will  I know when my last supper's  come?
Will my tale be written on a leaf?

Unconsoled  grief  can make   us dumb
Into  our  hearts, we drag the ice  that numbs
I have walked the silent paths of grief
I have made my bed on winter leaves

Oh,steam iron how I love your heat
And how you make my clothes so neat.
A flat iron is no use to me
For  no open fire is here,you see.
And thought I liked the flickering coals
I feared those faces that looked droll.
They were in the flames and peered
At anyone who ventured near.
I wonder how the people past
Kept their trousers neat and pressed.
Now I’ve bought a hand steamer
To keep the germs  off my femurs
I didn’t like to say,my crotch
In case the devil is on watch.
I never ever used to think
My body perfume was distinct.
And yet it may appeal to men
I don’t want to try again.
One dear husband is enough
Though he did enjoy a cough
He had asthma and bad eyes
Looking out with wild surmise.
He saw my golden hair float by
As by his window it did fly
All at once he fell  for me
And we sat by an apple tree.
His clothes were wrinkled so I thought
I would iron them for a start.
He could darn and polish floors
Cook lamb chops and apple cores.
So my steam iron sees much use
I wonder if it’s self abuse
For  as a woman feminist
I’m not meant to iron vests
I’m not meant to  boil  mens’ socks
Nor their pants of interlock
I’m not meant to make them tea.
What a naughty person,me!
I must  confess these wicked sins
Then I’ll polish my cake tins.
Satan wants me down in hell
Don’t say he needs my  iron as well
As he was an angel proud
I’ll save him into One Drive Cloud.