Category: Thinkings and poems

A  virus causes tremors in the soul!

The mind and body are ideally whole
Heart  and spirit tempered by life’s pains
A  virus causes tremors in the soul!

Every day events can take their toll~
Chilblains and carbuncles take the blame
The mind and body are a  perfect whole

In  our sleep, our dreams take curtain calls
We are little Shakespeares by life lamed
A  virus causes tremors in the soul!

As we grow we each endure the Fall
This choice for knowledge causes us great shame
The mind and body are a  perfect whole

Envy, jealousy and hate  on love do haul
All   digested fit within our frame
A  virus causes tremors in the soul!

Love how words combine to play a game
And attempt to give all beings names
The mind and body  may  become a  whole
But  viruses cause tremors in the soul!

Radio 3

I play Radio 3 on TV
And play with my thoughts generally
But I’ve been  so  tired
I’m being rewired~
Then you can play Radio 3  right off  me

I eat food from a white  china plate
But it’s been arrested  for causing debate
For it has no passport
No   hat  and no coat
Nor does it feel any hate

Do you think Theresa May may make hay
As she knows how to scythe  and  display
The car park is full
And here is John Bull
We just need a  bellow louche

Not by words

How like a nest my bed has now become
My favourite books  sleep on the duvet edge
I see their titles in the morning sun
And see  more falling off the window ledge

I read Ted Hughes’s letters as I doze
I like  the Guardian letters  and reviews
And glancing at the style page at the clothes
Seems to make my mind  run soft and smooth

 

Thinking of Ted Hughes,my thoughts are these
How one choice  can  rule an entire life
Was marriage made to quickly  or to please,
For who was Sylvia but his fragile wife?

Poetry may be  good or bad or naught
I will sleep and  not by words be taught

When you hit me,the Fall spread across the world

 

When you struck me,I vibrated like a kettle drum,
then as smaller percussions and repercussions
echoing from all the glassy surfaces
creating a balletic geometry of sound tracks
in space and time.

When you knocked me down,
I fell against her and her and her;
we were like a row of skittles
and we all went down with the lifeboat;
The infinite chain of being is.

When you hit me,the Fall spread across the world
Now there is no Vertical
All is undivine and graceless.
By the Rod it’s ruled

When you left me,I left myself,the world,the rocks,dry land
I weighed down sank to the ocean bed
with coral eyes
gazing.

When you struck my mind
I became an instrument of a foreign power
Singing a song I didn’t know.

When the glass was smashed
the splinters flew into all our hearts.
You didn’t know what we couldn’t see.

I lay on barren ground and gave birth
To my own Creator in the desert.

Then lose them in the maelstrom of the day

I thought that I had mended my old lamp
How beautiful it looked  beside the bowl
The shade fell off when I was walking past
I’m filled with sorrow,grief and wailing dole.

Everything I break brings thoughts of you
And when I write, I wonder what you’d think
No-one else will criticise my work
And into the quicksands I seem to sink

I burned ten pans and broke a dozen plates
I even broke a vase in the cafe
I  think of phrases subtle,erudite
Then lose them in the maelstrom of the day

I will learn to  live with broken heart
As humans  are not born with such spare parts

Leonardo on painting versus poetry

Leonardo on painting versus poetry

 

Leonardo on painting versus poetry

Leonardo’s writings about the superiority of painting over poetry and music (and sculpture) are the first important Renaissance contribution to the debate. The texts known as the Paragone today formed the opening part of the Codex vaticanus urbinas latinus 1270, which was compiled from Leonardo’s notebooks in the mid-sixteenth century.

19. How Painting Surpasses All the Works of Man on Account of the Subtle Speculations With Which It is Concerned

The eye which is said to be the window of the soul, is the principal means by which senso comune [a term adopted from medieval scholars, meaning an interior sense or psychology] may so copiously and magnificently confer  the infinite works of nature, and the second way is the ear, made noble by being told about things that the eye has seen. If you historiographers or poets or mathematicians, had not seen things with your eyes, badly would you be able to refer to them through your writings. Poet, if you were to figure a narrative as if painting with your pen, the painter with his brush would more easily make it satisfying and less tedious to comprehend. If you claim that painting [is] mute poetry, the painter could say that poetry [is] blind painting. Now consider which is the more damaging monstrosity, to be blind or to be mute. If the poet, like the painter, is free in his inventions, [the poet’s] fictions are not as satisfying to men as paintings [are]. For, while poetry extends to the figuration of forms, actions, and place in words, the painter is moved by the real similitudes of forms to counterfeit these forms. Now consider which is a closer examination of man, his name or his similitude? The name for man varies in different lands, and the form is mutated only by death. And if the poet acts through the senses by way of the ear, the painter [does so] by way of the more worthy sense of the eye. By these [comparisons] I only wish for a good painter to figure the fury of a battle, and for the poet to write something about it, and for both [of these battles] to be put before the public. You will see which will stop more viewers, which they will consider longer, which will be give more praise, and will satisfy more. Certainly the painting, a great deal more useful and beautiful, will please more.

———-

Ah, new men

Newcastle-girls-926661.jpg

How much is it to get holiday insurance?
For where?
The UK

Just don’t go there.They played snakes and ladders and the snakes have won.
But are they real?
Am I Sylvia Plath? Is God dead?
Why ask me?
It’s   rhetoric
Do  stop showing off and speak  normal British
Oh great!
I shall wait and see.I feel  in doubt
Feel me free and it will remove any doubt
About what?
That I am past it!
But you are a Senior Citizen
Well,  even they have been known to have sensual pleasure.
I don’t believe it
Do stop arguing, it’s bad enough that my name is Danish
What do you mean?
People shout at me , Send the Vikings back to Scandinavia.
But the Vikings came a thousand years ago
The Romans sacked Jerusalem two thousand years ago and now we have Israel.
Only a thousand more years to wait then
For what?
Those black ancient Britons who’ve been in Africa 2,000 years
Send them back to Britain!
But whites here think the blacks will have to go back  when we leave the EU
But they are not from the EU
When did truth and reality ever come into it?
When Jesus was crucified?
Now you tell us!
It might have been the electric chair if electricity had been invented
I would not like to have a little electric chair hanging on a gold chain round my neck.Not to mention Jesus fried to death in it
It would keep you chaste
It would be a deterrent.
It would make me feel terrible
Well, don’t wear a crucifix!
I see what you mean
I believe an abstract god is better
Like abstract algebra is more fun that arithmetic
Who does maths for fun?
God?
Maybe.Send him back where he came from!
Where was that?
Somewhere  where he liked to set bushes on  fire
I suppose it’s not surprising that he needs a  hobby
A hobby!You must be mad
Yes, and the odd thing is my mum and dad were too.
It’s  very odd indeed.
Thank you so clutch!

Russia?

Who would  believe that nerve gas was used in an ancient British city to  try to kill two people and damage the safety of  many more?
If it is Russia, can we be protected? It is a heavy blow to the  already fragile feelings of  our community as we struggle with Brexit.

Our origin

A picture frame, a coastline, or a fence
The edges of   our thought fall off this world
Our limitations guide us and makes sense

Structure allows release  of our defence
Like  unborn babies in the womb stay curled
Think picture frame, or coastline, or a fence

A home is where we give our love a chance
Burn bright  fires to turn  lead   into gold
A limitation guides us with  its sense

Boundaries contain our values   dense
Keep our hearts from freezing when we’re cold
Think picture frame, or coastline, or new fence

Beyond  the reach of words,  stretch real, immense
The grounds where  life and pain are grasped and held
Humility  informs us with  its sense

From swollen eyes   the rinsing tears will well
Pride and envy melt, destroying hell
The edges of our  knowledge shiver then
Beyond them  we can sense our origin

We do no wrong

Israel and Palestine.There is no
Palestine, they say, there is no Is
Rael, they say
It’s  illness,illness,illness.
We don’t want your Jews. ok?
We don’t want refugees, ok?
There was no Cat as trophe, they cry
There was no Holo Caust, they sigh
Worse things happened somewhere else
Worse things that were more intense
I do not see your world at all
I do not see what may appall
I’m innocent,I did no wrong
I never heard your Arab songs
We don’t want Europe’s trash down here
We  did not love your Al gebra
Oh,dear
We’re ill all day and weep all night
We kill the others out of spite
Or they may bite
It’s night.
Cry out.
In doubt
There is no Israel, they say
There was no Palestine they say
Psychotic
Chaotic
Dramatic
Fanatic
Goddamit

“There occurs a breakdown in communication … and there is the real illness.” 

11041115_597699793703236_633064765984573221_n.jpg
Art by Katherine

By Philip Dick:

“Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication … and there is the real illness.”
― Philip K. Dick

Art,poetry

DSC00054https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/sep/20/art.poetry

 

“The poems I wrote during my residency were not an attempt to explain the paintings, their stories and hidden narratives, but more of an interpretation, a way of seeing and sometimes giving a piece a voice. But would the poem based on the painting grow from the perspective of the onlooker or from a character within the painting? Would it enter into a dialogue? “Perspective” in painting, I discovered, is related to “voice” in poetry.

Picasso’s Weeping Woman, with its haggard, fractured features and clash of colours, made me want to give that haunting face a voice. In the end I wrote in the voice of Dora Maar, the woman on whose face Weeping Woman is based:

They say that instead of a brush

he used a knife on me –

a savage geometry.

But as I say, look again,

this is the closest

anyone has got to the pain.

Green knows me –

Not the green of new shoots,

but the ghastly green of gangrene.

Yellow knows me –

Not the cheery yellow of the sun

but the sickly hues

of this war’s putrefaction.

Blue knows me

Not the boundless blues of sky or sea

but the blues of the singer’s

deepest sorrow.

Mother Dolorosa,

this grief has got to me.

Under the poise of my red hat

I hear, as if from a great

distance,

my own stifled scream.

Painting versus poetry

Photo0211.jpghttps://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/painting-vs-poetry

 

Painting vs. Poetry

Bill Knott, 1940 – 2014

Painting is a person placed
between the light and a
canvas so that their shadow
is cast on the canvas and
then the person signs their
name on it whereas poetry
is the shadow writing its
name upon the person.

Feeling is the highest art of all

How like a prison is a body lame
The mind  calls up desires and feels no shame
But bones and joints all give us  piercing pain
And  who will pay insurance or  take blame

In my prison, I massage as planned
I exercise my thighs with rubber bands
I touch my toes   and shake my own white hands
While down the channel  runs my little sand

I read King Lear and thought the king a  fool
He did not live nor die as monarchs rule
Now I’m stuck inside a structure cruel
I’m like the pin which hides inside your jewel

The body’s more important than the soul
As  feeling is the highest art of all

As high as a balloon let free in hell

Punctured by his words my spirits fell
I landed in a muddy, unfenced  drain
But as my face was blank, no-one could tell

As high as a balloon let free in hell
I tried a look of pride and deep disdain
But  ruptured by his words, my spirits fell

As stupid as a cat with a loud bell
For lack of mice, I’d cry and I’d complain
But as my voice is dim, no-one could tell

As placid as a milkshake which won’t sell
As  winsome as  a triolet on a train
Punctured by his  glance, my spirits fell

As optimistic as  the  sun in early Fall
As wise as was the jury of Dunblane
But as my voice was cracked, no-one  was thrilled

 

As sorry as a head with a migraine
As  cosy as a cat  by windows framed
Intense and metered like a villanelle
As my eyes are black, I cannot spell

 

So sharp

My pens and pencils are all well prepared
I have got a box of rubbers too
The pencils are so sharp they read my mind
And write down what they want me not to do

I am obsessed with implements and tools
But what are they without a task  to do?
Pens can write the words of any fool
As thinking is still legal although free

In my dreams I  meet with my old man
He wants me to go with him to Japan
I cannot get my pills inside my can
Thus I  will become an also ran

For nonsense is the wisdom of the Least
And all are welcome at the Pauper’s Feast

“Human Punctures”

My  new book “Human Punctures” will be published if and only if we stay in the EU.If you are Dutch please email me for a free tyre repair kit
You will be happy to know my electricity payments have not risen this year so no fuse wire is needed.
My Gas Service is being conducted by the Vicar as snow stopped British Gas from getting  to me.
My water is being analysed by Oxford University and I may be rewarded  by free leaks
I will have a bath this year.Then next year I’ll have a  toilet.
Oxford_Cornmarket

 

  • Many  men’s hands make the lights work free
  • Two beds are better than one if you hate your  legs touching in the night.
  • Too many rooks died in the broth.
    Pleasure twice, cut at once
    You can’t have your cake and eat  my shoe
    A bird in the band is worth  a coo in the bush.
    The bride comes before all the maids
  • Don’t haunt Charles Dickens before he’s lost
    Is it   today  tomorrow?
    Please bite clowns

Inside out, no person saw me float

The rain fell on my new striped woollen coat
The stripes are red and blue and green and white
It struck me that  it needed creosote

To save my coat ,I turned it inside out
I started a new fashion or a blight.
The rain fell on my new striped woollen coat

My mind was fey and I was dull with doubt
Thought has never offered much delight
It struck me that such  fancies are remote

Inside out, no person saw  me float
Through the  swollen gutter water’s  grates
The water got a grip on my  faux stoat

Is this the Flood, or merely a blocked spout?
It’s hard to judge when  staying alive’s  one’s fate
It struck me that such garments are too “haute”

My main fault is of being too polite
Which makes men of a sullen type ignite
The rain fell on my new striped woollen coat
I found it is acrylic, and it smokes

 

 

 

 

 

Tell them home is where to start

Photo0224 rty.jpg

Stan was cooking tea that day,

While his wife went out to play.

He cooked a pie of frogs and cress,

He wanted to impress.

Stan was wearing his old clothes.

Where old clothes come from,no-one knows.

He meant to change when he was done,

So he and Mary could have fun.

But Anne his neighbour rang the bell,

Stan was so surprised he fell.

He hit his head upon the stove,

And his poor scalp turned blue and mauve.

Ring 999 and ask for Dave,

This man is old yet must be saved

The paramedic gave him glue

To stick together his old shoe.

Then he rubbed on arnica..

His  head looked like Guernica.

“Get the camera,take a pic.”

Stan was feeling rather sick.

“How can you use my wounds as art?

Rest assured I’ll take no part.”

He hit the camera with his stick,

And felled his mistress with a brick.

So now they’re in a mixed sex ward,

This experience can be shared.

They get their food at 3 am

Half for the ladies,half for the men.

The doctor asked them what went wrong.

Both of them had lost their tongues.

Neither would say what they’d done!

Now their anger is all gone.

The moral of my myth is this:

Being an  adult is not bliss.

Mistresses can be a pain,

Especially if they’re very vain.

And better not to look for love,

Except with cats or sweet white doves.

Let your neighbour love you less!

And don’t make comments on his dress.

And as for voyeurs,keep a crutch.

Hit them hard, but not too much.

If they want a work of Art,

Tell them home is where to start.

How like a false god are my own beliefs

How like a prison are my own beliefs
Beliefs about my world and my desires
To give them up might give me much relief
Yet wish for safety  grips those who aspire

Anxiety will  curtail and make us tired
Its cheap  and free, no pill will give relief
Nor pacify the  tangles of barbed wire
How like a false god are my own beliefs

 

No crown  for she who suckles on  her grief
Nor for those who secretly are liars
Nor for those who fall like early leaves
When autumn has not lit its smokey fires

A new language of love may set us free
If only I can gently hold back me

 

Imprisoned spirits

12074961_627499507389931_9148223531256977453_n

How like a prison   is my cubicle;

A prison,a trap, a cell,a place of fear.

For humans,this  is truth indubitable;

We need to roam ,to see,to smell,to hear.

 

Yet in the bureaucrat realm , we must observe,

The rules laid down by  generations gone.

And from their ancient code we cannot swerve.

Even if by rules we are undone.

 

Did Euclid discover how grave was a bath?

Did Moses fear  to see the burning bush?

Did Einstein follow someone’s else’s path?

Did Socrates  give voice to utter trash?

 

Imprisoned spirits are to revolution called.

Lest by Ariel they should be mauled.

 

 





	


	



			
				


			

			
Darkness  flees in shock
		
	
	

		
Suddenly  it’s light at 5 o’clock

I  hear the chiming of a distant bell

The day expands as darkness takes a knock


Darkness brings on judgement and its dock

Time to question ,now we are in hell

Suddenly  it’s light at 5 o’clock


Our conscience can be cold, and. heartless,  mock

Why hate ourself and love another well?

Now day expands and darkness takes  the mick


 


Inside we feel we sinned then darkness struck

Prefer to be strong sinners than weak selves

Suddenly it’s light at 5 o’clock


Helpless in a universe star rocked

Who can bear the  infinite,  its wealth?

Glad day expands and darkness takes a knock


How good dreams guide us in their very stealth

Till all was, is and ever will be well

Suddenly  it’s light at 5 o’clock

Light day expands and darkness  flees in shock

	


	



			
				


			

			
Interview with writer Amy Bloom
		
	
	

		
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/13/amy-bloom-interview-god-love






Amy Bloom outside her Connecticut home
 Amy Bloom outside her Connecticut home Photograph: Dan Callister






When Amy Bloom writes, she tends to hear things before she can see them. For example, the title of her second collection of stories, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, was something an old boyfriend had said to her, so sweet and well phrased she suspects it prolonged the doomed relationship. In “Your Borders, Your Rivers, Your Tiny Villages” a woman observes that her husband and his friend “talk like they’ve just come from a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff”. They are white-collar workers, watching TV news, in the US equivalent of Surrey. “It’s either a first sentence,” says Bloom, “or it’s a little conversation between two people, and then suddenly I know who’s saying it. I hear the speaker and then I see the character and then I see the story.”


The men in the living room with their important opinions open her third collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, which sounds like a Judy Blume novel but is a decisively grown-up compilation of two quartets and four stand-alone pieces. It is a strange assortment, held together by Bloom’s unerring tone: sharp, dark, flatly hilarious, full of crises revisited which, with a chiropractic snap, are put into sudden perspective by those who have suffered them. There are the small transgressions – a teenager who paints a picture of the crucifixion on her trouser leg (“I’m not mocking Jesus,” I told my mother. “I’m just representing him, on my jeans”) – and the large ones: a woman who has slept with her own stepson, an old bully with Alzheimer’s who throws things at his family. All are recounted with restraint and brevity. A man called William says to his wife, “darling, you are as clear and bright as vinegar but not everyone wants their pipes cleaned”. It’s a sentiment that might apply to the author, who, on a freezing day in Connecticut, poses gamely in a blizzard and issues a friendly warning to the photographer: that in photos she tends to go one of two ways, OK or George Foreman.




 

	


	



			
				


			

			
Happiness- is it usual?
		
	
	

		
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Why are there so many books on happiness and yet less actual happiness?

I like this piece  by Amy Bloom in the  NYT. I find reading reviews makes me happy.Men make me happy of they are humorous.Women do because they converse well.And peace and quiet make me happy.


I’m so happy


Not to be a baby in a nappy.


I feel so blue


When I miss you


I don’t want a lover.


Too much bother.


I like to be alone


Just me and my comb.


Shakespeare was a poet


I know it


And I am not


I quite forgot


As I felt gay


All  of today


I’ll be sad


Or maybe mad


as rotation


is the human situation


OMG!


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In Spring  new life springs out from ancient wood
		
	
	

		
In Spring  new life springs out from ancient wood

Yet at the end of winter we despair

Forsythia yellow is the first in bud


Despair  afflicts  us as we sink in mud

We can’t imagine earth shall be more fair

In Spring  new life springs out from ancient wood


Sap is  rising  silently like blood

Yet we doubt like Thomas with blind stare

Forsythia yellow is the first in bud


A miracle of nature and its good

Men propose and even women  dare

In Spring  new life springs out from ancient wood


Most of life we take on trust and should

For doubt and angst are morbid forms of care

Forsythia yellow ,oh to see it bud!


And  for the Cross, wild Jesus was its flower

For humble virtue  has no earthly power

In Spring  new life springs out from ancient wood

Ancients worshipped, Nature was their  god


 

	


	



			
				


			

			
Is it a sonnet?
		
	
	

		
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photo by Mike Flemming 2015






This poem is written in the sonnet form

And yet I have my doubts about its shape

Though nearly to that structure it conforms

There may be places where non- essence gapes.




It looks and speaks just as a sonnet would

And talks of metaphysical concerns.

Do we conclude, as poets and writers should,

That in our schizoid age we cannot learn?




For humans may be clothed in skin of wolves;

And lambs be decked with lions’ fearsome furs..

Thus senses can be tricked and problems solved.

Which of us will praise a cat  that purrs?




It looks like one,it feels like one,it speaks.

Yet  nothing human’s heard except our shrieks







	


	



			
				


			
				


			

			
Will Jesus ride  a  pure white horse in heaven?
		
	
	

		
Where you live it’s zero thirty seven

Past midnight,past illusion, past despair

Did Jesus, when he died, believe in heaven?


Of his apostles ,there were left eleven

To fight amidst the scrum of human war

Where you live it’s zero thirty seven


When he died the earth itself was riven

The elements electrified   and far

Did Jesus, when he died,  conceive of heaven?


You’re behind me so you have not risen

But lie abed with love soaked skin and hair

Where you live it’s zero thirty seven


Look  with sharpness and with broader vision

Relax your eyes from superhuman stare

Did Jesus when he died arrive in heaven?


The universe of meaning is your lair

The Word is sacred,captains will declare.

Where you live it’s zero thirty seven

Will Jesus ride  a  pure white horse  in heaven?