Author: Katherine

Poetry writer and author

At any touch my skin to anger’s lured

By my golden wedding ring, skin’s red
And now my entire body seems disturbed
The rash runs on my surface like new blood

Was it something evil that was said?
By politics and terror, we’re perturbed
By my golden wedding ring, skin’s red

I would take my skin off, if I could
Nonsensical, post  modern, quite absurd
The rash runs on my surface like fresh blood

As they said once, better red than dead!
Would Sigmund Freud with that notion concurred?
By my golden wedding ring, skin’s red

I wish I were a puppet made of wood
With ears  that could not hear and vision blurred
The rash runs on my surface like fresh blood

My angst and my anxiety are stirred
At any touch my skin to anger’s lured
By my golden wedding ring, skin’s red
The rash runs on my surface like new blood

 

 

With my body, I thee worshipped well,

The extraction of  love’s deepest  roots  was free
Anaesthetised  and numbed, I did not  guess
On wakening, I feel loss bitterly

In the mirror, nothing I can see.
But in your note, you surely would confess
The extraction of love’s deepest roots , be free!

Shall I compare this to the winter’s fee?
Where ghouls and spirits seek for their redress
On wakening, I feel loss bitterly

There was a holy spirit, you and me
The inter self is ripped and I am less
The extraction of  love’s deepest  roots  was free

The trinity of love  made its own plea
But only  the  unknown  and darkness  tells
On wakening, I feel loss bitterly

 

With my body, I thee worshipped well,
From my skin to every living cell.
The extraction of  love’s deepest  roots  was free
On wakening, I feel loss bitterly

 

Sine qua non

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https://www.merriam-webster.com/news-trend-watch/brzezinski-the-_sine-qua-non_-of-a-stable-world-order-20170527

 

Brzezinski: ‘The Sine Qua Non of a Stable World Order’

‘Something that is considered essential’

Lookups for sine qua non spiked on May 27, 2017, following news of the death of Zbigniew Brzezinski (\zuh-BIG-nyef bruh-ZHIN-skee\), a foreign policy expert who was President Carter’s national security advisor. Some reports of his death included the text of the statesman’s last tweet, from May 4:

Sophisticated US leadership is the sine qua non of a stable world order. However, we lack the former while the latter is getting worse.

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‘Sine qua non’ is the Latin phrase that literally translates to “without which not.”

Sine qua non is the Latin phrase that literally translates to “without which not,” and is used in English as a noun to mean “the one thing that is absolutely essential,” as Brzezinski used it, and can also mean “something that is considered essential,” as in “the book is a sine qua non for word lovers.” This Latin phrase has been used in English contexts since about 1600, when Latin was still the language of academic, religious, and legal discourse and was widely understood by educated speakers of English.

Sine qua non is also used adjectivally in English to mean “absolutely necessary” (as in “sine qua nonconditions”). Conditio sine qua non is occasionally used in English to mean “an indispensable condition.” Our 1934 Unabridged dictionary also included the adjective sine-qua-nonical and the noun sine-qua-noniness.

Accepting that you’re gone.

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To look upon your countenance is what I  most desire

To sit with you and hold your hand by this red winter fire

But you are  now so far away,I do not recognise
Those  smiling features dear  to me and your loving eyes.



You had a merry cheerful soul and loved all your friends

You may have loved your enemies,to wit I'll not descend.

I heard your voice one morning late,I heard you clear your throat.

I hastened down the stairs  and found your old brown winter coat.



I pulled the coat nearer than and felt salt tears  slip down

They ran across my face and dripped onto  your coat brown

The memories seem too few,my dear,though we had happy times.

And now I must be going so I'll finish off this  rhyme.



So  many years  a part of me,the hole with sorrow filled.

I'll sit and gaze at these bare trees until my heart is stilled

Goodbye,goodbye, goodbye my love, my dearest one.

I'll try to start my life again,accepting that you're gone.

How art can defeat boredom and-loneliness

 

How Art Can Defeat Boredom and Loneliness

Unlike the flat data of the internet, books are multidimensional; and they engage and nourish all our mental faculties—our whole selves. There are books that answer the basic impulse of curiosity; and for people of a certain temperament—or perhaps for all of us, if it isn’t stifled—intellectual and imaginative curiosity can be as strong as libidinal desire. In various studies of such things, the urge to know has been shown to be deeply raveled with erotic energies, and following its direction and urgency leads to the best kind of reading. We may want to read a book about the latest discoveries in cosmology, or the latest studies of ant colonies, simply because such things are fascinating, and worth knowing; and because they reawaken our sense of wonder about the world. Or we may want to read a biography of a person we admire, or a history of a period which is of interest to us. Such books not only satisfy our desire for “objective” knowledge, but they give us a wider personal lens through which to view and understand the world, and our own location within it. They literally broaden our mental horizons and our perspective—and there is great enjoyment, as well as an intrinsic value, in that.

But it is imaginative literature—fiction, memoir, personal essays—which provides the fewest pragmatic answers to the question “why read,” and gives us the richest reasons. To make a rather sweeping proposition, imaginative literature is the art form most capable of encompassing all dimensions of human experience: the outer and the inner world, specific facts and the elusive textures of consciousness, the stories of individual selves and of the self within culture and society. Unlike factual texts which, at a pinch, can be summarized on Wikipedia, fiction and personal writing cannot be so condensed without losing something of their essence.

Reading of this kind cannot be done in a hurry. To enter a very good, or a great book (the latter are admittedly rare, but there are good reasons why we refer to them as classics), is to enter a world: the world created by the text, and the implicit world of the author’s voice, style, sensibility—indeed, the author’s soul and mind. This takes an initial stretching of the mind, a kind of going out of the imagination into the imaginative landscape of the book we hold in our hands. It is often a good idea to read the beginning of a book especially slowly and attentively; as in exploring a new house or place—or person—we need to make an initial effort of orientation and of empathy. Eventually, if we are drawn in, we can have the immensely pleasurable experience of full absorption—a kind of simultaneous focusing of attention and losing our self-consciousness as we enter the imaginative world of the book.

The experience of absorption in a book is both very private, and universal. A book whose reputation has lasted has been, and will be, understood by many readers across various periods and languages; it speaks to something about the human situation that apparently transcends, or overarches, historical and cultural differences. But when we open a book we also enter a conversation between ourselves—a particular reader, with particular responses—and the text. Plunging into a novel or memoir and becoming absorbed in it calls for a certain receptivity, the willingness to “listen” attentively to the voice of the author and the minds of others. As we follow the plot of a book, or its logical and emotional argument, it is good to pause occasionally and enter into a dialogue with the voice we’re listening to—to check on what we’re thinking as we read, or whether an observation or an insight strikes us as true or insufficiently so.

Our literary heritage is so enormous, and the production of new books so constant, that if one wants to give examples of what literature has to offer, one can only be very arbitrary. The writer who has been a lodestar for reflective readers for several centuries is Montaigne; his essays have been used as aids to introspection, and as stimulus to meditation on essential aspects of human experience. He was the first to coin the term “essay” (“attempt”)—to describe what he was doing—and it is a form which perfectly suits his project, which was to observe himself and others without prejudice, and to find out what he felt and thought. In a sense, he is the first modern writer to attempt the individualist route to self-knowledge—that is, a method of investigation based not on religious precepts or prior philosophical ideas, but on close and uncompromisingly honest self-observation. Perhaps that is the secret of his continual appeal, despite the fact that his style is quite old-fashioned. If his writing retains its immediacy across the centuries, that is because in his essays he gives us the movements of his mind as it explores and circles around a subject, or around itself.

In a way, Montaigne was one of the first psychologists, examining himself without preconceptions and without trying to arrive at any dogmatic conclusions. He knew that the human soul (what later came to be called the psyche) is full of “divers passions,” that we are not unitary in our moods or even our deeper inclinations. He understood that pain and loss are inevitable in human lives; and he believed that insight into those emotions can make them bearable. Above all, he believed in moderation. Even virtue, he thought, “becomes vicious, if we embrace it too stringently and with too violent a desire.” Drawing on the classical philosophers, and foreshadowing psychoanalysis, he intimated that the emotions needed to be mastered—but not stifled or repressed. But he also valued his preferences and his pleasures, which he described without prior moralism or prejudice. He wanted, above all, to preserve his quirky individuality, and the particularity of his temperament and perceptions; and this makes him excellent company, interesting and surprising on every subject. One could do worse than spend some time with him—most of his essays can be read in less than an hour—and to remember the pleasures of self-observation, of sensing ourselves as specific personalities with individual predilections and temperament.

Montaigne is a central monument in the literature of self-observation, but since then, the literature of personal essay and memoir has grown large. Before the rise of formal depth-psychology, it was imaginative writing that gave us the richest examinations of human subjectivity. Freud acknowledged as much when he said that poets and writers were his true predecessors.

I

Your thinking is too concrete.

Why did you buy  sliced bread?
My hand  reached out and picked it up
That’s a silly answer
Well, it’s true
Are you telling me you can’t control your own hand?
I can hardly control anything
You tell me!
I didn’t mean that, anyway it’s not my fault
I never said I didn’t like it.
You never said you did either/
Didn’t I?
Are you telling me you can’t control your own memory?
Well, I  do remember you wore teal coloured pyjamas
What’s that got to do with it?
Would you be as ardent in grey ones?
That’s absolutely ridiculous
Why?
Who would buy grey pyjamas?
It depends on who is selling them
But surely if you want something, it doesn’t matter who the seller is.
I’d think about that if I were you.Would you buy HP Sauce from Hitler
I never knew he had any.
Your thinking is too concrete.
I never could understand anything except logic.
Even Wittgenstein said , the rest is silence.
What about the bit that isn’t?
I don’t know.He was a philosopher of note
I didn’t join soulmates to meet people like you
Why did you join?
My hand reached out and picked up a pen
I think you might be schizoid
Thanks so much.I don’t get many compliments
Well, you are very nice in bed.But is that good or bad?
Don’t ask me, I’m a split personality.
My,you’re clever, aren’t you?
No one ever said that to me before
Well, you are brilliant
Wow, I think I’ll leave while the going is good
Oh, don’t go yet
Why not?
It is early in the night
I thought it was breakfast time
With you  near me , it’s night all day
You should write poetry, you know
Why?
It will take your mind off love.
Do you think that’s a good idea?
I don’t know, my mouth opened and the words came out
I’ve never met anyone like you before.
Thank you.Neither have I

Post truth, post love, post reason, that’s a start

The art of lying seems to have a master
His face betrays his mind and lack of heart
He lies much longer, wilder faster

It’s not unclear he’s driving to disaster
And poisoned by  desire, we’ll  play our part
The art of lying seems to have  its Hitler

“Other” truth, a verbal sticking plaster
Post truth, post love, post reason, that’s a start
He lies  like Stalin, wilder faster

Aghast, we stare, yet kneel to our new master.
If this is real, then we are in the dark
The art of lying seems to have a master

He  revels in his lies, hides not his laughter
We’re with the children in the bloody park.
He lies like Nero, viler faster.

Who are they now governed by a shark
Cold and silent without voice or bark?
The art of lying seems to have  its master
He lies much crueller, wilder, faster

Geopolitics and the psychopath

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Geopolitics and the Psychopath

 

Physicist and psychoanalyst Ian Hughes wrote:

A small proportion of people who suffer from psychologically abnormal personalities have, throughout history, had an immeasurable detrimental impact on our societies, our politics and our world. Enabled by their ruthlessness to readily acquire positions of power, they have long dominated the psychologically normal majority of the world’s population.

The reading of a fundamental scoop?

The heart in grief feels like an abscessed tooth
Too pained to sleep or chatter with the group
We fear a dark acquaintance with the truth

What savage way shall be our burdened proof;
The reading of a fundamental scoop?
The heart in grief throbs like an abscessed tooth

What innocence was left for us to lose?
Our faces pale, see how the eyes still weep!
We fear a deep acquaintance with the truth

And if we meet it, how shall that be used?
From our  hearts where does sorrow creep?
The heart in grief throbs like an abscessed tooth

We need to lie, to live while still confused
The  algebra  of logic’s sieved unsent
We die from  our acquaintance with the truth

Where the mind and soul who has this dreamt?
Where is God, if that sentence makes sense?
The heart in grief feels like an abscessed tooth
Yet we are on poor terms with the cost

Why the terror attacks happened now

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Why the London Terror Attack Occurred Now

 

“So what do these terrorists hope to achieve?

Based on prior experience, they will assume that by striking now they can increase fear and anger among the British population – intensifying anti-Muslim rhetoric, justifying harsher “security” responses from the British state and shifting political support towards the right. That is good for their cause because it radicalises other disillusioned Muslim youth. In short, it brings recruits.

Islam is not exceptional in this regard. This is not a problem specifically of religion. As experts have repeatedly pointed out, disillusioned, frustrated, angry (and mainly male) youth adopt existing ideologies relevant to them and then search for the parts that can be twisted to justify their violence. The violent impulse exists and they seek an ideology to rationalise it.

Once Christianity – the religion of turning the other cheek – was used to justify pogroms and inquisitions. In the US, white supremacists – in the Ku Klux Klan, for example – used the Bible to justify spreading terror among the black population of the Deep South. White supremacists continue sporadically to use terror in the US, most notably Timothy McVeigh, who was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

Terrorists can exploit secular ideologies too, on either the far-right or far-left. Just think of the Baader Meinhof Gang and the Symbionese Liberation Army, back in the 1970s. The latter famously made a convert of Patty Hearst, granddaughter of publishing empire magnate William Randolph Hearst (aka Citizen Kane). After she was taken hostage, she quickly adopted the group’s thinking and its violence as her own”

The poet Elizabeth Bishop

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3229/elizabeth-bishop-the-art-of-poetry-no-27-elizabeth-bishop

 

One Art American Academy of poets

Elizabeth Bishop, 1911 – 1979

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

An interview with Arthur Miller

 

 

9100773_f520https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4369/arthur-miller-the-art-of-theater-no-2-arthur-miller

 

INTERVIEWER

When Death of a Salesman opened, you said to The New York Times in an interview that the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we’re in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity. Do you consider your plays modern tragedies?

MILLER

I changed my mind about it several times. I think that to make a direct or arithmetical comparison between any contemporary work and the classic tragedies is impossible because of the question of religion and power, which was taken for granted and is an a priori consideration in any classic tragedy. Like a religious ceremony, where they finally reached the objective by the sacrifice. It has to do with the community sacrificing some man whom they both adore and despise in order to reach its basic and fundamental laws and, therefore, justify its existence and feel safe.

INTERVIEWER

In After the Fall, although Maggie was “sacrificed,” the central character, Quentin, survives. Did you see him as tragic or in any degree potentially tragic?

MILLER

I can’t answer that, because I can’t, quite frankly, separate in my mind tragedy from death. In some people’s minds I know there’s no reason to put them together. I can’t break it—for one reason, and that is, to coin a phrase: there’s nothing like death. Dying isn’t like it, you know. There’s no substitute for the impact on the mind of the spectacle of death. And there is no possibility, it seems to me, of speaking of tragedy without it. Because if the total demise of the person we watch for two or three hours doesn’t occur, if he just walks away, no matter how damaged, no matter how much he suffers—

Two brave men in the London Bridge attack

Giovanni Sagristani, 38, and his friends were in the El Pastor restaurant on Stoney Street when one of the attackers came in and stabbed a woman in the chest.

“He came in shouting and just stabbed her,” he said.

left is Carlos, on the right in blue shirt is me.Image copyrightGIOVANNI SAGRISTANI
Image captionCarlos (left) and Giovanni were in a restaurant where an attacker stabbed a woman

Mr Sagristani’s partner Carlos Pinto, 33 – who works as a critical care nurse in London – attended to the woman, with the help of his friend, another nurse.

“They took some ice and cloths and tried to stop the bleeding. She lost half a litre of blood in the beginning. He was keeping pressure on the wound,” Mr Sagristani

Stained glass in the rain

 

So then you went away,

A soft blue September day.

Our love disappeared-

you suddenly weren’t here.

Losing you was not

An experience to forget.

Earthquakes in my heart

Since we were torn apart.

My heart in fragments then.

A jigsaw to begin

Now I am fresh born.

A stained glass window formed.

From fragments stuck with glue.

A pattern came anew.

My heart is so sad now.

A strength within me grew.

The way I had to go……..

My life’s deep river flowed

Only now I know

Earthquakes in my heart

Will forever be a part

Of life which comes anew

Since I’m not bound to you.

New patterns can be made

From life’s colours and shades.

Not what I first chose.

I was one of those

Who planned my life ahead;

But what I got instead,

Feelings newly born

When my own soul was harmed.

Cracks let in the rain,

And I broke up again.

Not what I had planned

When my grown up life began.

I don’t know where you are

But though you’re gone, I care.

I don’t hold on to hate,

As a permanent life state.

I saw the ground split wide.

As I broke up deep inside.

What is in or out?

In pain we sadly doubt.

From that fragmented state,

My new self   was made

Earthquake in my heart,

Love had made a start.

But patterns can be wrong.

So love did not stay long,

The pattern was destroyed.

Hate by love employed

Made patterns subtly new.

I was sad that I lost you, but

Earthquake in my heart,

Gave me another start.

Stained glass window panes

Look through in the rain.

Stained glass colours glow

My eyes show what I know.

Stained glass in the rain

I will love again.

Stained glass colours glow

Inner light will show.

Earthquake in my heart

I’ll make another start.

Drowning in the rain

Soaked right through with pain.

Colours will now blend

And my heart will mend.

Earthquake in my heart

When my “true love” went

Earthquake in my soul

One day I’ll be whole.

Stained glass mirrors gleam

Life’s not what I dreamed.

Symbols in the rain.

Symbols of shared pain.

Mirrors of my heart

Shattered into parts.

Bleeding wounds will heal.

This is how life feels.

Earthquakes in my heart

When a love departs

Fears of girls

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What if your knickers fell down if the elastic wore out
What if your stockings got pulled off the suspenders?
What if you laddered  your stockings
What if you bled through your summer school dress?
What if men looked at your breasts? Not that I had any myself.
What if you forgot to confess the only mortal sin you ever committed– being alive?
Then they say women are not as talented or creative as men
Would men wear suspender belts?

G-d himself was shattered, without skin

And did you see the sparks of light within
The hidden wood where watches the bright dove
The darkness which to human soul’s akin

God himself was shattered, without skin
Each part a  broken light of what was love
But did you see the sparks of light within?

And round the whole world, mystics  then began
To seek the little jewels that once were G-d
The darkness which to human soul’s akin

Each fragment was eternal  in its span
And yet was helpless as on it man trod
Though some might see the sparks of light within

Hidden from the  world of human sin
Afflicted by G-d’s death; now weeps the dove
Why is darkness where we must begin?

Can we bear Reality or Love?
Can we  live, survive the coming flood?
Yet we  see the sparks of light within
The darkness which to human soul’s akin

 

Into this green dream, its world is hauled

From being a cliche, lawn, flowers, boring shrubs
My years of sickness grew the garden wild
Now a meld of birdsong, wind, and wood
I yearn to enter, yes, I am beguiled.

Like an island in the suburb’s sprawl
The penetrating focus of owl’s eye
Into this green dream,  its world is hauled
For survival, wildness has turned spy.

Even if, at  last, survives one  tree
One leaf, one branch, one root, one  seeded pod
There  a nest of singing birds shall be
There shall be a presence of the good.

Until  our world’s destroyed by burning lies,
Poets shall sing and chant until all dies.

William Shakespeare, 1564 – 1616:Let me not to the marriage of true minds

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Let me not to the marriage of true minds   
Admit impediments. Love is not love   
Which alters when it alteration finds,   
Or bends with the remover to remove:   
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;   
It is the star to every wandering bark,   
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.   
Love ’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks   
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,   
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.   
  If this be error, and upon me prov’d,   
  I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

Now we must live them

I made a  cheese flan
Both burned  black and undercooked
It was edible

I guess my knack left
Along with my dear husband.
All's been cremated!

That's why I can't eat
I see Auchawitz and Dachau.
Christianity.

These ring the death knell.
That Pope was  no kind of star
Mechanical  thought

Christianity
Now has come to its ending
Crucified itself.

Resurrection
Will not do us any good.
We must start over.

But crawling on  earth.
Kafka made the images
Now  we must live them

Get a thrill

33

I decided I needed more excitement in my life so I washed my dry clean only trousers.
I am afraid to look now, but at least I didn’t use the 95 deg hot wash.
I have a better idea.Shall I steam them next time. It will kill the germs; I don’t know if they will look any cleaner but it beats playing Patience all day long.
I sent a Christian interpretation of the Bible to a  Jew of the Orthodox kind.Did I say “kind” well, he was the opposite..Is it my fault if I am a  fat, dumb, unfeeling, unsympathetic, bald cow?
When my husband died, my friend sent me an extract from “The Book of Pure Drivel”.What does it mean?Should I buy the book?
Answers will be useful.Do you wash wool suits in the machine?

h

The still small voice

 

 

9100776_f520https://www.gotquestions.org/still-small-voice.html

 

Question: “What does it mean that God speaks in a still small voice?”

Answer:There is only one place in Scripture where God is said to speak in a “still small voice,” and it was to Elijah after his dramatic victory over the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:20-40; 19:12). Told that Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, king of Israel, was seeking kill him, Elijah ran into the wilderness and collapsed in exhaustion. God sent an angel with food and water to strengthen him, told him to rest, and then sent him to Horeb. In a cave there, Elijah voices his complaint that all of God’s prophets had been killed by Jezebel and he alone had survived. God instructed him to stand on the mountain in His presence. Then the Lord sent a mighty wind which broke the rocks in pieces; then He sent an earthquake and a fire, but His voice was in none of them. After all that, the Lord spoke to Elijah in the still small voice, or “gentle whisper.”

The point of God speaking in the still small voice was to show Elijah that the work of God need not always be accompanied by dramatic revelation or manifestations. Divine silence does not necessarily mean divine inactivity. Zechariah 4:6 tells us that God’s work is “not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,” meaning that overt displays of power are not necessary for God to work.

Because He is God, He is not confined to a single manner of communicating with His people. Elsewhere in Scripture, He is said to communicate through a whirlwind (Job 38:1), to announce His presence by an earthquake (Exodus 19:18), and to speak in a voice that sounds like thunder (1 Samuel 2:10; Job 37:2; Psalm 104:7; John 12:29). In Psalm 77:18 His voice is compared to both thunder and a whirlwind. And in Revelation 4:5, we’re told that lightning and thunder proceed from the throne in heaven.

The shadows of the family drift alone

The shadows of the family act alone
They’ve been cut off from consciousness and care
They do bad deeds,attack destroy their own

We cannot reach our shadow on our phones
Nor seem them in the mirror of despair
The shadows of the family act alone

In darkest times when one of them’s in pain
To  hold their  feelings  in seems  ever rarer
They do bad deeds, attack, destroy their own.

Yet if  they’re questioned, they  at once explain
That what they do is really very fair.
The shadows of the family act alone

How hard is it  to  our own self regain
When feelings sharp have caused a  painful tear?
We do bad deeds, attack, destroy our own.

Oh,would we had the strength to suffer, care
And not discharge our rage quite unprepared
The shadows of the family  drift alone
Do bad deeds ,show ill will to their own

Someone is writing a poem by Adrienne Rich

WesternRocks2017

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/essays/detail/69530

 

The society whose modernization has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalized secrecy, unanswerable lies, and eternal present.

The spectator is simply supposed to know nothing and deserves nothing. Those who are watching to see what happens next will never act and such must be the spectator’s condition.

—Guy Debord

In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode. The reading of a poem, a poetry reading, is not a spectacle, nor can it be passively received. It’s an exchange of electrical currents through language—that daily, mundane, abused, and ill-prized medium, that instrument of deception and revelation, that material thing, that knife, rag, boat, spoon/reed become pipe/tree trunk become drum/mud become clay flute/conch shell become summons to freedom/old trousers and petticoats become iconography in appliqué/rubber bands stretched around a box become lyre. Diane Glancy: Poetry uses the hub of a torque converter for a jello mold. I once saw, in a Chautauqua vaudeville, a man who made recognizably tonal music by manipulating a variety of sizes of wooden spoons with his astonishing fingers. Take that old, material utensil, language, found all about you, blank with familiarity, smeared with daily use, and make it into something that means more than it says. What poetry is made of is so old, so familiar, that it’s easy to forget that it’s not just the words, but polyrhythmic sounds, speech in its first endeavors (every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome), prismatic meanings lit by each others’ light, stained by each others’ shadows. In the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones of language take on colors that disappear when you sieve them up out of the streambed and try to sort them out.

———-

Weapons of Serious Destruction: the Underwired Bra Mania Concerto

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Compulsive Flirting Disorder Symphony
Theresa May Losing Certain Election Imitation Syndrome for Triangle and Drum
Underflirting  and/or under talking Syndrome  Quarte for piano and oboe
Underwired Bra Accident Disorder a new play by Miguel Strain
Shapewear  Excessive Itch  Disorder: latest writings of the nouveau cliches
Side Zip Trouser Stress Incontinence and its effect on schizophrenic cats
Lack of Public Conveniences Obsessive Anxiety Syndrome set to be played on  a harp
Side Zip  Trouser Lumbago Dances
Fear of Wearing Skirts Syndrome:Ballet Trouseau
Fear of Knicker Elastic Phobia and Rondeau in G minor
Fear of Wire coming out of Bra in Public : Concerto for three wire strung violas and  gutted cello by Lady Katepotatos Ph.D [Clotsford and Anchorage]

 

Conservative party ads on youtube

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I felt distressed because I wanted to listen to Mozart’s Requiem.I put it on and suddenly Theresa May’s voice began talking loudly.How much money are they wasting on this? Then they have one mocking Jeremy Corbyn.Well, it has made me like him more!

EveningSky

Make use of effects that occur by accident

I do have a camera but often I use my phone.Now it seems the lens is damaged.It gives a blurred effect.I found it quite interesting that I could make some  images quite different from the usual ones.I already put one here on a post.These are all made from the same photograph.I find them quite moving as if I am in another dimension

Trust the dark, the unseen aspects

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“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”
St Julian of Norwich

Trust the unknown force that grew you,
From the joining of two cells.
Act of love, of mutual giving,
Created you, a   unique self.

Trust the dark, the unseen aspects
Of the life we all must live.
Trust that there is wisdom elsewhere,
To your emptiness to give.

Wait in patience for the time
When inspiration comes at last
Trust in darkness, silence, lowness.
Opposition forms the cross.

Pain is bearable in lowness,
Like the worm, in earth I dwell.
When I look I see the sunrise
And I trust all shall be well.

On quicksands

On quicksands, we must  travel at  some speed
Pausing, to the sucking sands we cede.
No rumination nor  excuse will save
Nor will our weeping stop the  steady waves
For of our needs,  stark nature takes no heed.

If on our journey should we pause to read
Or peer on phone to see where paths should lead?
No, we must walk as swiftly as is brave.
And this alone may give us what we need
On quicksands.

We’d best not stop despite our feet may bleed
As when a bull is charging we need speed
No special clothing nor appearance suave
Will distinguish us from harlots or from knaves.
We’re at risk as in a storm a reed
Will break and God does not deceive.
On quicksands.

Quicksands

Life and danger live through these quicksands
We cross them with excitement and unease
Drawn there by the warmth of loving hands

Across the bay, there are the mountain lands
Where dwell  the  sheep who roam as they may please
Life and danger live  through these quicksands

Astute the eye ,we look for what’s beyond
The rocks so  pressured by the winter freeze
Drawn  there by the  pleasure of love’s hand

Nothing either weather or seasons
Protects us from the storm, the strange disease
Life and danger live on these quicksands

Humans live beyond sense or reason
Imagination  fluid  yet will not freeze
Drawn  there by  the thought of children’s’ hands

Some stay inland and cultivate the bees
Others want to cross  untrusted seas
Life and danger live over  quicksands
Men drawn there by the hope of better lands

The present moment with its gravity and grace 2

The sparrows sing as if to draw me to
The present moment’s gravity and grace
Our contemplation of life’s nature new

What  other attitude is worthwhile now
That I no longer see your loving face?
The sparrows sing as if to greet me too

Eden is still here, we miss the clues
We miss the  ardent touch,  the lost embrace
Our contemplation of the world renews

On my face, the tears are jeweled dew
In my body, I feel held, enclosed
The sparrows sing as if to greet me too

Now the blackbird sings as if on cue
Inside my swollen heart, I feel its grace
Contemplation of  life’s nature new

I saw your soul in your transparent face.
And crisscrossed lines from struggle left their trace
The sparrows sing as if to draw us to
The contemplation of the  wildness true,