No words

If we had no language,we’d be good
No communication but by sense
What devil conjured up the  demon word 
Made our dealings complex and intense?

No Tower of Babel, nothing but mud huts
Caressing,kissing,kicking,  real contact
Boxing,wrestling,killing the unjust
No law except the fist. no guilt.no wrack

No religion but  a sense of awe
The rising sun, the moon, the distant stars
Oh,bow before the Cedar and the Oak
Anything that is taller than we are

No  books, no news no media,no war
It makes me wonder what live words are for

Like babies

Sunday dinner. roasted  spuds and meat
Yorkshire puddings, gravy,pepper,salt
These are what the English like to eat
Though microwaves  may bring it to  a halt

Roly poly,syrup sponge and cream
Apple dumplings,marmalade on toast
Men adore hot puddings gently steamed
Though who will  have the time to be a host?

Now we buy sponge puddings ready made
Bread and butter custard ,raisins,hot
How did  women manage in past days?
Spotted Dick, brown sugar,that’s the lot

We seem to love the sweet yet we are rude
Still like babies, ignorant  and confused

What is nonsense in the modern age?

To write nonsense one   must think it first
Then translate thought into a  little verse
But what is nonsense in the modern age?
The more I hear, the more I feel enraged.

Yet Lewis Carrol made a lot of notes
Jabberwocky is a  poem he wrote
Where  time was always brillig  in his day
And mimsy was the passion for the stray

And Alice went behind a looking glass
She got trapped and missed the IT class
When she saw the minus and the plus
She said, Oh, my,I thought it  merely glass

Mirrors are a vital  need  we  have
Especially when we lead a  dog to bath
Lacan and Winnicott each  state
The mother’s face will mirror  and emote

So if  your mood swings  are too much
It never helps to go inside a church
Try  a  little dose of opprobrium
The shock is less  if you have  got a chum

I wonder why  the  head is so attacked
Electric shocks, brain surgery from quacks
When massage with essential oil of rose
Curies hysteria and warms the running nose?

I  hate the doctors and their ignorance
I really  ought to  learn to love a  dance
For it’s the entire body that needs aid
It is for this that many people prayed

What is nonsense but a better world
Where babies laugh and little girls have curls?

 

 

 

 

O wounded heart

O wounded heart,I cannot heal your pain
I shall bear it  as it still  remains
But why should I forgive  the one who broke
My tender  heart, my love and all I wrote/

The pride of men, the  anger soon provoked
The  cruel emails and  the  words he spoke
Why can’t we be kinder, more aware
Yet God himself was  killed,  who can compare?

The sadist drawn to those  who seem less strong
Will find  a dozen reasons  to do wrong
They  know their own pain not  the pain they cause
Some will kill  despising land and law

We  choose life despite these cruel  acts  
We ‘ll do well if we can live with tact

In a tilted glass

The kaleidescope is  shaken,something moves
Like the height of water in a tilted glass
The beast approaches shuffling off its groove

By poetry we cannot ever prove
We hope for Evocation  like the Mass
The kaleidescope is  shaken,something moves

We forget how culture used to soothe
 The  days of Lent  and then the Friday Fast
The beast approaches shuffling past its groove

Here is Christ, Messiah,King of Jews
Here arrive the endangered and the mad
Are we shaken, are we even moved?

God or Satan, who do you think we choose?
Two heads on one coin, we have  been  had?
The beast approaches shuffling  through the Louvre

The language is too violent,Precious Blood
Better play it softer  or we flood
The kaleidescope is  shaken, let’s be brave
The beast approaches shuffling from its cave

 

 

 

 

Reason by its nature is not Art

Reason by its nature has no heart
No soul,no body,faceless  but for eyes
Feelings are made outlaws. love departs

The schizoid self, the broken appetite
The failure to acknowledge our own lies
Reason by its nature has no heart

Where did we  go wrong, where did we part
From  compassion to the lowly, to  mad heights
Feelings are made outlaws. have no charts

Graphs and figures,lessons maladroit
The Nazis numbered Jews, turned off the lights
Reason by its nature has no heart

Who would do great evil and  make charts
Coded homes,  surveillance is our plight
Feelings are like outlaws.  they depart

Logicians made machines without insight
Do  robots  voices bring us sweet delight?
Reason by its nature has no heart
Feelings  gassed  like insects, love  departs

 

The storm

The rain  has hit on my windows   with great force
Like the horns of bulls  toss bloody matadors
The Spanish rites acquaint us with  our lacks
For in the end we by a horse are dragged

The bull is strong with open fearsome eyes
But in the end it  is the bull that dies
Helplessly  he runs and he rotates
Strength and helplessness are not good mates

The matador takes risks to taunt the beast
From a snack  he  makes us a great feast
Better to   be eaten by a  man
Than make a meal for worms  when death has come

Men may claim they’re strong and great and  pure
In the end it’s  wits that have most power

Lucky is the conscript with his pun

Oh,false Britain when the sun was low
Could you not bomb Auschwitz, torture den?
Light blinds our eyes  yet soon the world would know
I rarely see bare branches birch trunks, glow.

Yet here they stand  like candles , who may come?
Oh,false Generals  like the sun  you’re low
My mind feels  high as codeine , my heart’s  cold

Here the hare runs ,awed  by dawning sun
Light helped men   to kill  Jews  for teeth gold
This summer is a fake with  its mixed modes

Lucky is the conscript with  their pun
Oh,false summer light breaks ,blackbirds run
See the leader, envy  not their  gun

With all his weapons he can’t   fire the sun
Oh,false summer, light dance, fire may roast
We   turn  black with rage, oh holy ghosts  

To heal the earth

Hellebore_2020-5We are not the ones to judge our worth
God’s    attention is  for this alone
We  love and find vocation  on the earth

Some are born with what feels like a  curse
Others have  been keen to cast sharp stones
We are not the best judge of our worth

Accidents of time, of place, of birth
Lack of vision,nowhere to call home
Disrupt the  virtue of our life  on  earth

Important  to love God and  enjoy mirth
To  laugh at our pretensions, grin and groan
We are not the best judge of our worth

There is no linear scale. we should not stress
Some may discern value  we don’t know
Acceptance is the aim of  life on earth

And when we’re stricken by a heavy blow
Inside our little hearts is one who knows
We are not the best judge of our worth
We must love and  work  to heal the earth

 

 

 

 

 

Where is paranoia on my sat nav?

img_20200111_143234

Why have you not got schizophrenia?
Because it wasn’t on the shopping list

Why  the panic?
No, it’s  a punnet 

I want some nutter
Do you mean butter?’
When I say nutter I mean it

Do stop knattering

What is a declension?
All I know is you can’t eat it

What is the plural of  yoga?
Yogae

You broke the Law
Divide and conquer

Where is Latin?
It’s under “Tongues”
Tongues  of Fire?
Sacrilege is bad for you
I’m a demoness
That is not PC
I’ll take the WC instead.
You can’t take it all with you
I’ll  just take the cistern

Do you  think that is funny?
No, but this is

The kindness

Every time  I think that I will stop
That poetry is not my kind of game
The kindness of my readers picks me up

I start again and emptied is my cup
I wander through the library of names
 I feel the affect  and the unwilled stop

In the mind we know we suffer gaps
That every heart and soul has got its stains
The kindness of my readers picks me up

Each of  us can share our  homemade map
Can ask for comfort when we are in pain
All feel the affect  and the unwilled stops

Comfort me,  give charm to my black cat
He seems to have no affect, he is lame
The kindness of my readers picks us up

Would we wish the wild world to be tamed?
Were better if we could start  life again
Every time  I think that I will stop
The kindness of my readers draws me up

 

 

The enemy of vision

The sacred heart fragmented does not awe
Broken,lost, and trampled, global   wars.
We worship our own selves, by camera formed
There are no depths, no Saviour to be born

The horizontal Flatland  where we crawl
Does not encourage us to stand up tall
There are no experts, no-one  understands
The dignity of art, the  learning scorned

The heart has cracked, the jigsaw can’t be done
We all lose a game that no-one’s won.
Here comes a vacuum cleaner which will suck
The heart of God  mixed with our human muck.

Can we  think there is no vertical
The lost imagination, the strained will

A very good and rightly criticaI review of the film about Hannah Arendt

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/05/hannah-arendt-and-the-glorification-of-thinking.html

I came across this in the New Yorker,It has a lot of links e.g.to Claude Lanzmann’s film about the Shoa where his judgment is much  superior to that of Arendt.

“The evil of banality”

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2009/10/the_evil_of_banality.html

A very interesting and disturbing discussion of books about Heidegger and Arendt.Heidegger’s silence after the war about the

And looking at the quote below it seems they lacked wisdom

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