I tried to chat up a   lady
As men are now too young to see me
At first, she was kind
So I showed her my mind
It was relatively green and quite shady

I took her back home  where it’s safer
As long as my cat wouldn’t bite her
When she saw my mascara
It seems that it scared her
It is red but it failed to excite her.

We agreed that we hated dark grey
And the shades of it caused us dismay
So we watched Leonard Cohen
My love is still growing
But he’s dead and so he cannot play.

Photo by Mike Flemming 2017 copyright

Wait a Minute while I Procrastinate

Extract

“Gone Are the Days …

We live in such a distracting world these days. Too much information running through our brains (so goes one of my favorite Police songs). Gone are those halcyon days of rocking on the front porch, sipping lemonade, the big event of the day being the mail delivery. The phone was in the house, so if it rang, you didn’t really have to get up and answer it. Not like today, with our cell phones like an appendage we can’t live without. How did we get here? Did you ever imagine one day you would go into apoplexy if you weren’t “connected” to your tribe for more than a few minutes?

We’ve allowed distraction to be part of our lives. Few people have the discipline or the desire to discipline themselves to focus and concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. Sure, some of us have jobs where we have to focus or we’ll get fired. But during our personal time, off the clock and away from watching eyes, we let go of the reins. We allow media and life to pull our attention in a myriad of directions. Sometimes we feel like a kid at a carnival, with all those bright, shiny, noisy, exciting things clamoring for our attention.”

http://www.wordsworth-editions.com/blog/virginia-woolf-1941

Confused by sun, which shone like a red fire,
I  dressed for summer, made myself a meal
I sat outside and now I feel quite dire.

My husband  was  a gentleman and liar
He told me  he was warmer than  hot steel;
We sinned, seduced by sun, which raged like fire.

My mind’s made up; his ashes are for hire.
I need the cash to  get this cold to heal
I  ate outside and now I feel quite dire.

My eyes are red and no-one them admires.
I miss the cat, shall I adopt a seal?
Bemused by men, whose eyes watch me on fire,

I loved online and it was but satire.
He spun my mind and then he spun the wheel.
I loved outside and now I feel right queer.

My mind and heart are broken and concealed
No man will  see my body on newsreels
Made mad by men who claimed to be on fire,
I lay outside and now I feel desired.

Attention in the moment gives us grace
To lose our self in seeing brings us peace.
We see the most when we are most effaced

Life is  a strong tapestry of lace
The little threads connect and never cease
Attention  to each  moment  brings us grace

A friend who never doubts, we can’t embrace.
They make  themselves more boring than a beast
We hear the most when we are most effaced

A friend who’s open gives our hearts solace.
With these, we share the wine, enjoy a feast
Attention  to each  moment  brings us grace

We will  meet our  lovers as we play;
Who notices the details, most and least.
We feel the most when we are most effaced

In our soul, we feel the spring release.
Guarded by attention, not police.
Attention in the moment, that is grace
We see the most when we are most effaced

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/20/what-makes-bad-writing-bad-toby-litt

“Bad writers often believe they have very little left to learn, and that it is the literary world’s fault that they have not yet been recognised, published, lauded and laurelled. It is a very destructive thing to believe that you are very close to being a good writer, and that all you need to do is keep going as you are rather than completely reinvent what you are doing. Bad writers think: “I want to write this.” Good writers think: “This is being written.”

To go from being a competent writer to being a great writer, I think you have to risk being – or risk being seen as – a bad writer. Competence is deadly because it prevents the writer risking the humiliation that they will need to risk before they pass beyond competence. To write competently is to do a few magic tricks for friends and family; to write well is to run away to join the circus.

Your friends and family will love your tricks, because they love you. But try busking those tricks on the street. Try busking them alongside a magician who has been doing it for 10 years, earning their living. When they are watching a magician, people don’t want to say, “Well done.” They want to say, “Wow.”

At worst, on a creative writing course, the tutor will be able to show you how to do some magic tricks; at best, they will teach you how to be a good magician; beyond that, though, is doing magic – and that you will have to learn for yourself. For what a tutor can’t show you is how to do things you shouldn’t be able to do.”

Mary had been reading a new book called,” The Path” by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh.To her surprise, she saw it reviewed on her phone where she read the guardian news.She had decided to get out of bed on the other side just to start.
When she awoke the next day, she remembered her vow.Unfortunately, she forgot she was inside a fleece sleeping bag with a zip on one side only.Should she get some scissors and cut her way out on the other side?Or  was that a foolish  idea since nobody but she would know she had failed her to keep her first new promise.
She heard a noise and them her friend Annie came in wearing a long satin nightgown and a  green velvet trench coat.
How do you like this, she asked Mary?
Mary was very red yet silent
What is wrong, with you Mary?
I need to pee but I can’t get out of bed on the wrong side.
You have no choice, said Annie.You must not wet the bed or die from a burst bladder.
But I feel a failure on my first day.
Maybe that is your lesson.Accept you can’t  do it and get on with your day.
Mary ran to the bathroom.What a relief passing water can be to poor ladies who suffer afflictions in these regions.
Annie went down to the bijou yet complex kitchen and began to make some toast and boil some eggs.She gazed at the peach walls and melon cupboard doors unable to decide if she liked them.Maybe kingfisher blue might have been better.Too late now.Mary could not afford a new kitchen even if this one was really old.At least it was not orange as was common in the 70’s.
Mary came in with her golden hair standing up on end like candlesticks from the Synagogue.
I just got a shock,  she said
I can see your hair is standing on end.Was it the electric socket?
No, there was a man looking into the window and I was naked in the bath.
Perhaps it was King David, Annie joked.Why don’t you have frosted glass?
Stan said it would frost itself in the winter.He was the least practical man in the world.
Maybe we could glue artificial frost onto it?
Who was the man, asked Annie her cheeks pinker than her perky pink lipstick by  Licumb ; those lips which were  so thick and sensual with a lovely curve.
Mary tore her eyes away from these lips.I didn’t have my glasses on, she said.Maybe it was a man from a hot air balloon?
Maybe someone fancies you at last,saidAnnie.
Do you think I’d  go out with a man who does things like that?
No, you could stay in with him, Annie joked, as tears of mirth made her green eyeshadow and red mascara stream down her cheeks like rain after a nuclear explosion.No wonder men ran after her in the street.
You could succumb to his charms,Annie whispered.
I think I’d like a man more sensitive than that, Mary screeched.
Well, Mary, you are so lacking in knowledge the art of flirting you only notice men when they do something really wild or unusual
Like what, asked Emile who had just munched up a bowl of dried cat food and was full of energy.
Well, Stan kept pretending he loved reading Newton’s original writings which he bought from some unusual website thinking it would impress Mary. However as he failed O leve; maths 5 times he could not understand it.He sobbed and cried in the public library and Mary was moved by his grief.Later on, though, he became  angry at her intellectual talent and took me as his mistress to get back at her.She never even noticed!
I don’t see how having a mistress is a revenge  on  poor woman who was given her genes by God, said Emile.
Don’t be daft, she buys her  jeans from TK Maxx, Annie answered.
And so do all of us.

I can’t write any more right now!

See the descriptions  and detail on Mike Flemming’s butterfly blog

http://www.ukbutterflies.co.uk/phpBB//viewtopic.php?t=7459&start=720#p117759

Humans with creative spirit blessed
Mothers with their  cherished babies smile
Yet submit to numbers like known masochists

Culture changes, takes alarming twists.
We lose our voices  no more to beguile.
We’re human, we’re creative spirit fleshed

The snake in Eden laughs; he sees the gist.
Before we know the culture, we’re entwined.
We submit to numbers like dim masochists

We do not know, and so cannot confess.
Here comes down the reckoning, we hide.
We humans with creative spirit cursed!

We counted sheep and goats but not  the lost
Now it’s missiles, warheads, thunderous rides
We submit to numbers, shady masochists

The government has numbered all the hosts.
Archangels slumber   round the Holy  Ghost
Humans with creative spirit cast
Into the holy waters; are we lost?

My love is like a mirror, that’s covered in thick dust.
Oh, alright you can kiss me,  but will you dust me first?
You lost the yellow duster!
My mind is filled with wrath.
How can you reflect me now?
I’ll take a virgin’s oath.

My love is like a bedspread that’s never had a wash.
We like to be entwined in it and share a pipe of hash.
You never bought the grass?
What brought us to this pass?
We’ll have to wash this duvet first,
Then go out and get smashed.

My love is like jacket, which dropped off a large spud.
It’s still quite warm and tasty, but will it be much good?
You want to ask advice?
I’m  not sure that is not wise
Creep quick inside my pocket now
And soon we’ll go to bed.
My love is like a camera film, that’s never been exposed.
I want save the battery until I find a rose.
But it’s not summer yet!
My Lord,did I forget?
It was sitting in this warm armchair,
Reciting all my woes.

My love sent me a message, that he was nearly home.
So I ran a bath, jumped into it and covered myself in foam.
His key is in the door.
It’s only half-past four!
I took my mobile off the chair
And rang for tea and scones.

My love was very angry as I never made the bed.
He bought me wood and iron but it went out of my head.
Oh,where are we to kiss?
Oh,where’s our night of bliss?
He looked so  disappointed
I got my bag and fled.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mythos

Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naïveté.

Faith is not a question of the existence or non-existence of God. It is believing that love without reward is valuable.

Signs and symbols guide the route.
Love gives the soul her appetite.
Though the night is black and starless,
The inner guide is never careless.
The notes are struck, the tune is played,
Plain melodies are overlaid.
In this chant and benediction
Healing comes for desolation.
Though the passage way is narrow,
This road is the one to follow.
Struggling through the mud and mire,
We see in darkness tongues of fire.
The sacred centre of our life
Is never found without some strife.
Just then, the dark and light combine.
To create a symbol for the mind

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/susan-griffin

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/susan-griffin

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/51404

I tried to put my card in the right slot
Then  why it asked my number, I forgot
The people waiting all began to moan
So I took their picture with my mobile phone.

I’m posting it on Twitter  just for fame
It’s about time I  found  some other folks to blame
I never sign a cheque nor write with pens
As my spectacles have lost their plastic lens.

I sat down on an armchair in the Bank
And  as I did I felt my spirits sink
How will I get money or pay bills?
By the way, I just made 9 new wills.

After I had  used a credit card
I went outside; I felt my morning marred
Then  suddenly  my PIN came to my mind
My face smoothed out and lost those extra lines.

I might have it tattooed onto my arm
An action like the  Nazis might   acclaim
They numbered  Jews of Europe, stamped on them
That was when the countdown was begun.

How they tried to take their dignity.
The Jews recited Kaddish quietly
They praised Lord G-d and thanked him,  giving praise
For G-d is most mysterious in his ways.

The Nazis were the first to number man.
And decorate our arms with numbers, what elan.
But now the government seems very kind.
Or else I’m stupid, mad and  blind

Numbers have their place but we need names
We’re human and live in a larger  frame
Once we were baptised   and  named to G-d
Now we’re numbers so computers hold the Rod.

For numbers need no spelling  like words do
My name is Thornthwaite, morning, how d’ye do?
It’s so difficult to spell it makes men shout.
You’re number 870 nine trillion noughts.

One day they’ll have us microchipped
They’ll herd us into lines with their strong whips.
And as we  read the Fifty Shades we see know
The forest glades are better than Soho.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/third-over-80s-avoid-cash-000100929.htmlhttps://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/third-over-80s-avoid-cash-000100929.html

I forgot the PIN for my debit card owing to trying to hurry and because I’d not used it for 3 months,.I used my credit card.They charge interest from the day you make the withdrawal and it is about 4%.They tried to charge me £25 for cancelling a cheque I had lost within the house until I gave them a choice

1 Take your  £25 and I close my account
2.Cancel the charge

They chose 2

From Southport to Sarajevo

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/geoffrey-hill

“Known as one of the greatest poets of his generation writing in English, and one of the most important poets of the 20th century, Geoffrey Hill lived a life dedicated to poetry and scholarship, morality and faith. He was born in 1932 in Worcestershire, England to a working-class family. He attended Oxford University, where his work was first published by the U.S. poet Donald Hall. These poems later collected in For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958 marked an astonishing debut. In dense poems of gnarled syntax and astonishing rhetorical power, Hill planted the seeds of style and concern that he has continued to cultivate over his long career. Hill’s work is noted for its seriousness, its high moral tone, extreme allusiveness and dedication to history, theology, and philosophy. In early collections such as King Log (1968) and Mercian Hymns (1971), Hill sought “to convey extreme emotions by opposing the restraint of established form to the violence of his insight or judgment,” according to New York Review of Books critic Irvin Ehrenpreis. “He deals with violent public events. … Appalled by the moral discontinuities of human behavior, he is also shaken by his own response to them, which mingles revulsion with fascination.””

There’s a black  mark in the kitchen on the floor
It’s cracking with the weight of  fatal thought
I tried to get if off  with vinegar

On my kitchen, I  have got no door
But Penguin  books   about  what peasants ate
There’s a black  stain in the kitchen on the floor

I’ve got Palestinian olive oil
Oranges from Haifa, lemons bought
I  made a dressing with  wine vinegar

I  have eggs from morganatic whores
And fish enjoy their roes, which they don’t ought
There’s a black  cat in the kitchen on the floor

Sometimes that hot waiter never boils
If he’s  tipped I’ll write with him,  I hope.
I  insulate my   food with bugged cigars

Do you ask a  woman if she’s coiled?
Do you invade others in turmoil?
There’s a  sweet man in the kitchen by the door
If he’s Jesus, tell him all  and more.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/17/reviews/990117.17hammert.html

By LANGDON HAMMER

THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE By Geoffrey Hill. 82 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $22.

eoffrey Hill’s ”Triumph of Love” is a book-length meditation on ”the fire-targeted century” now ending, an elegy for everyone who has burned. I say elegy, but in fact the poem is a carnival of literary kinds: it incorporates schoolboy gags, theological excursuses, radiant landscape pictures, mock litanies, epigrams, London music-hall routines and seething political satire. Hill rapidly shifts from one mode to the next as he proceeds through the poem’s 150 separate sections, some of which are as short as one line, some as long as a page and a half. The poem’s aim is to honor faith and innocence as embodied in victims of historical violence, above all the European war dead and the Jews of the Holocaust. It is an aim Hill has kept before him almost continuously since ”For the Unfallen” was published in 1959, the first of his eight books of poems. Always an exquisitely, even excruciatingly self-conscious poet, he now turns on himself with fresh intensity, interrogating his aims and means even as he defends them. One of the poem’s parodic voices (a stand-in for a public that would prefer to forget about its debts to the dead) wonders, ”What is he saying; / why is he still so angry?” The uncomprehending question is its own reply.

Hill’s work has always been difficult, a resistantly private art weighted with literary allusion. ”The Triumph of Love” is no exception, but there are ways into it, and Hill’s engagement with past literature is always a means of reflecting on public life. The title refers to the first of the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch’s ”Trionfi,” a series of allegorical processions that describe the preparation of the poet’s soul to meet God. Hill’s poem is penitential too, but it lacks Petrarch’s allegorical machinery and the consolations of Christian doctrine that come with it. There is no climax to its agonized mental action, no definite promise of relief. Late in the poem, an impatient reader, schooled in Renaissance literature, breaks in: ”So what about the dark wood, eh? / When do we come to the dark wood?” Listing the names of World War I battle sites, Hill retorts:

We have already been sent to the dark
wood, by misdirection: Trones, Montauban,
High Wood, Delville, Mametz. We have been there,
and are there still, in a manner of speaking.

The forests of World War I are more real than the dark woods of literary tradition. We are still lost in them because we have not yet, as a culture, come to terms with the killing that was done there, and we allow it to go on elsewhere. It is a powerful claim. Hill no sooner makes it, however, than he qualifies it, reminding himself and us that the point is rhetorical, something true ”in a manner of speaking.” The next section begins: ”But only in a manner of speaking. / I was not there, nor were you.

• 

  All Souls CollegeWikimedia Commons

  http://www.arduity.com/toolkit/risk.html

  This is a website called Arduity which is about difficult poetry; how to understand it and has many good discussions about risk and so on.I recommend it just may make reading poetry less scary.

   

• • Allusion
  • Ambiguity
  • Annotation
  • Paying Attention
  • The Meaning Problem
  • Poetic Risk
  • Explaining Difficuly
  • Difficult Subjects
  • Difficult Words
  • Obscurity and Difficulty
  • Difficulty and Surprise
  • The State of Poetry
  • Difficulty resources
  • Critical difficulty
  • Difficult theory
  • Difficult examples
  • The ‘ism’ problem
  • Your contribution
  • Frequently asked questions
  • About arduity

  Poetic risk in difficult/innovative verse.

  Introduction.

  It can be argued that any act of creative endeavour creates a degree of risk but I feel that the making of poetry entails an intensity of risk rarely found in other forms. This is because poetry has a reputation for authenticity and honesty and also because the history of verse carries with it a strong idea of what is good and what is doggerel. Indeed it is difficult to think of another art form which has a specific genre for everything that is technically poor. Poetry’s reputation for honesty also carries the risk of poets going too far with self-exposure or with the exposure of others. There’s also those poets who defy expectations by producing something apparently at variance with what has gone before and thus run the risk of critical rejection. Finally there are poets who become more and more experimental and thus run the real risk of losing an increasing numbers of readers along the way. The following aims to look at various examples of poetic risk over the last 50 years and to consider what may behind such behaviour.

  Poems that risk themselves.

  Some poems seems to hover on the edge of collapse whilst others play with the wavering boundaries of sense and nonsense. Simon Jarvis’ ‘The Unconditional’ threatens imminent collapse by its reliance on lengthy digression to such an extent that the reader often forgets what is being digressed from and readerly exasperation is only staved off by the brilliance of the language used. Paul Celan’s later work explores the idea of a poem on the edge of itself as it explores and celebrates the limits of language.

  The Confessional Risk.

  Geoffrey Hill is not thought of as a confessional poet yet there are at least two occasions where he discloses more than the reader may be comfortable with. The first is from poem 109 in the “Triumph of Love” sequence:

  Since when has ouir ultimate reprobation
  turned (occulos tuos ad nos con-
  verte)on the conversion or
  reconversion of brain chemicals-
  the taking up of serotonin? I
  must confess to receiving the latest
  elements, Vergine bella, as a signal,
  mystery, mercy of these latter days.

Oh, mother, father take me back
I’ve lived the pain, I ‘ve felt the lack
I wanna see Jesus.
Take me to that  wall they  built
Let me see where blood’s been spilt
I wanna see Jesus.
Oh, take me back to where I was
The enemy may well be us,
Not Jesus.
What did all those sermons do?
Did they say he was a Jew?
Oh,Jesus.
Did he want the First Crusade
It is his blood  the priest creates
Lord Jesus.
I don’t like the way things are
I am getting tired of war
Kill Jesus.
What has human wisdom done?
From Wittgenstein to Abraham
Cripes,Jesus!
Does research improve our lives
As for grants the scholars strive?
Ask Jesus.
We may have  chemotherapy
Radiation, history.
Where’s Jesus?
You’d think that after all the years
We’d have used  up all our tears
Sweet Jesus.
Love your neighbour as yourself
Give 1% of all your wealth
Aye, Jesus.
Do what’s better, not what’s worse
I see another fragrant hearse.
It’s Jesus.
See the plastic Crucifix
See  him  dying with dry lips
Bend your knees, confess your sins
Otherwise,  the Devil wins
Not Jesus.
We destroy the good we hate
Envy writhes  and with pride mates.
The progeny will wreck the earth
Eden’s burning as drones pass.
No, Jesus.No Jesus.
Know Jesus.