I have  filled my mind   with  dreams   and thoughts
I have drawn conclusions  that seem real.
What’s of  value’s not by effort bought.

As Ted Hughes said,  his fishing was the sport
Which brought both meditation and a meal.
I have   studied minds   and  dreams   and thoughts

We see ,like that,new images are caught.
In silence and in noticing  the feel
What’s of  value’s not by effort bought.

What we find may not be what we sought
At  first,it may not show its wise appeal
I have  found  my mind   through  dreams   and thoughts

In the night the images  take flight.
God destroys at night what has congealed
What’s of  value’s not by effort wrought.

Like a butterfly, a flowering dart
Of love and beauty  which was once concealed
I have  found my mind  by  dreams, my  wordless thoughts.
What’s of  value’s not by effort bought.

My husband was so kind.He ate his dinner from the cat’s dish and let the cat eat with me.
What I didn’t bargain for is he wanted me to mate with the cat as well.After all, why would a man get married if he didn’t want to mate?
Only because he’d get his clothes washed and his sheets changed.Is that logical?Surely hiring a cleaner would be cheaper?
At least he didn’t harass women or men.He prefers reading to sex and so do I after the cat bit me.Is it my fault cats are smaller than women?
Did I roll over in bed on purpose?I was asleep.I was dreaming about a therapist who told me to stop reading Freud.
That was easy.I never read any but I am good at pretending to be super intelligent except with men,.They don’t like it,oh,no.
I used to read Wilfred Bion in bed till my husband asked me what it all meant and I said, he’s a mystic.O!
I decided to go back to base with a Rupert book.I got my first one when my mother took me to the Royal Infirmary to have my adenoids re-removed.What a bloody mess that was.When she came to take me home I was having a haemorrhage.That is not an enema!
Still, in either case, you can’t go out.
She brought my hat and coat made of green wool which she had made herself and my sister came too and she was in yellow.How I howled when they left me again.I was 5 and I’ve never recovered.
It’s those mini aspirates that writers have to use to famous, they literally make you bleed and bleed you do.I can’t believe my blood is so red a lady asked me what was the name of my lipstick as she wanted that colour.I should have told a lie but I forgot and said I wasn’t wearing lipstick.
How cruel.I should have said it is Paris in spring by Max Factor and then she would have gone all over Birmingham asking for it.That’s what we women like.Wearing makeup and tormenting men by wearing transparent leggings and crop tops with red bras over the top.It’s our right to freedom of gastrumation.But is it moral? Is it a sin
Pray Father, I have worn transparent leggings in  church
Through my fault, through my most  grievous  fault
Don’t exaggerate.I couldn’t see a thing
No, women don’t have things.They have openings.
For your penance wear a dress next week.Amen

A beam of light passed through my eyes 

And showed to me a world disguised 

So near,yet far,we do not see,

 Unless by gift of grace redeemed.

 That world is full of peace and calm

 Its colours mingle,like a balm.

 In such a moment all thought dies,

 Revealing Love which underlies. 

Colors caress my naked eyes.

 Sunlight blesses new designs.

 I stand enthralled,and do not wish

 For one delight,other than this. 

My breath slows down, and filled with joy,

 I rove my eyes with bliss to toy.

 Everything is just itself.

 This is now my living wealth.

 Beneath the noise of city traffic,

 This mellow joy,love soporific,

This depth and peace, is always near 

When we choose Love and turn from fear

What lives within is seen  in those outside
We fear to fail, so curtail our ideals
Choose presidents with vulgar minds unkind

To reach for new developments is wise
We estimate what work and play  make real
What lives within ,we love  in folk outside

In humour let the unkind lead the blind
And watch  the  confused centipedes  downfall
Like presidents in vulgar ways, unkind

The human on the saddle bold should  ride
Not pulled by asses, broken cart and all.
What lives within, we see  in folk outside

Now jet-propelled with nuclear nuts  inside
We think   our tweets are glories as we maul.
Oh, president, in vulgar ways, unkind.

Oh, Adam, Eve, remember that first Fall
Naked and unknowing babies bawled.
What lives within is seen  in those outside:
In presidents  who seem vulgar , unrefined

The sun makes  autumn leaves   look like  gold flowers
Vibrant, energetic in the wind
Waving to small  children with love’s power

As Jesus looked out from his wooden tower
Was he severed from all humankind?
The sun makes  autumn leaves   look like  gold flowers

Forsaken by his Father, thunder lowered
The screen was cracked and shattered, by us blind
A menace to small  children and  love’s power

From the Christmas tree, gold coins had showered
Are these gifts from Judas or demands?
The sun makes  leaves   look like real  golden flowers

Can  God  be the vanished  point that lures
To infinity what shall remain
A solitude for worms, a love that cures?

Every figment has its own domain
From imagination , truth to human shame
The sun makes  autumn leaves   look like  love’s flowers
Attention must be paid while demons glower

• 

  Insanity in individuals is something rare — but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12368624

“”Creativity is certainly about not being constrained by rules or accepting the restrictions that society places on us,” chartered psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon told the BBC earlier this year.

“Of course the more people break the rules, the more likely they are to be perceived as ‘mentally ill’.”

So is it mental illness that drives people to art or art that drives people to mental illness?

“A lot of creativity comes from a conflict somewhere in your mind,” says Wright.

“I don’t think you have to be ‘mad’ to be a poet but if your mind is alive, then it can produce both positive and negative responses. It can mean wonderful things but it can mean that fitting into ‘normal’ life is difficult.””

Unexpressed emotions never die
It seems that they attain eternal life!
We give a  wanton wince, a wistful sigh

But might such hidden feelings lie?
As does a husband to a questioning wife.
Unexpressed emotions never die.

Muse on emotions hiding, wonder why.
Will they cause an everlasting strife?
We give a  quantum wince, transcendent sigh

As we grow older, feelings multiply
And fearing laughter, in  the back they’re knifed
Unexpressed emotions cannot die

And gazing ever closer, magnified
We divide each one into  unequalled halves
We give unnoticed winces to blind eyes

So what is left, what will of us survive?
All the feeling unexpressed in life!
Unexpressed emotions never die
Take care of what may be your endless lies.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68877/just-get-the-poems-out-there

“The first poetry blogger I ever read till my eyes swam was Ron Silliman. I knew him rather vaguely as the critic behind The New Sentence and the editor of the major anthology In the American Tree,despite his having published nearly 30 books of poems. By the time I found his blogspot in 2003, Silliman had been posting for almost a year. Picture me instantly hooked, not so much by Silliman himself as by the concept: a poet writing about poetry, in a personal, erudite but not necessarily scholarly manner, on pretty much a daily basis. I went back and read the year’s worth of archives, including his debut post from August 29, 2002 (which strikes me as funny now, given how popular his blog has become):

Blogs have been around for awhile now, but to date I haven’t seen a genuinely good one devoted to contemporary poetry, so it may prove that there is no audience for such an endeavor. But this project isn’t about audience. The fact that the blog has the potential to carry forward the best elements of a journal and seems inherently prone to digressive, if not absolutely plotless, prose gives me hope that this form might prove amenable to critical thinking.

Perhaps Silliman was one of the earliest adopters thanks to his familiarity with the computer industry, where he happens to work as a market analyst. He wasn’t the only one inspired by the possibilities of the rapidly evolving medium. The same month I bookmarked his eponymous URL, Silliman posted his first blogroll—a list of several dozen other poetry-focused bloggers. I’d never heard of most of them, even the handful who lived in Brooklyn, practically in my backyard. I clicked them all.

Totally thrilling. Within the month I was thinking, damn it. Could I have skipped my MFA program (which I’d delayed for years after my BA, unsure and wary) if the blogs had arrived sooner? (I was already working as a writer and had no plans to teach.) On these emerging blogs, as well as on e-mail lists and forums, I’d finally found what I’d been looking for working in publishing, hanging around at readings, and going to grad school: other poets. Not famous ones, elder ones, teaching ones, laureate ones, or the ones with books from Knopf stocked at Barnes & Noble. The other ones. Ones like me.

***

Whatever subset of POET you’re looking for, the Internet’s got them. Like the mimeograph and the photocopier in their day, blogging software and hosting services allow anybody to hang out a shingle and start publishing—without buying apps or renting server space, without registering a domain, and without knowing how to code a single tag. The key word there is anybody. Academic credentials are optional, no pitching articles to editors, no need to have three books out and another on the way. Fast, cheap-to-free, low tech-threshold publishing quickly has become as simple and ubiquitous as e-mail, and much more effective, in practical terms, than a letter to the editor when it comes to telling William Logan what you think of his latest review.

Which is to say, along with changing the speed and focus of aesthetic debates, blogs have also changed the participants. Reb Livingston,publisher of No Tell Books and the online journal No Tell Motel, agrees. She’s pleased to see outsiders infiltrate:

Poets who were never in the center (often these were women, but not limited to women), who weren’t getting attention, are now getting attention and readers—often more than the so-called mainstreamers. The old way of getting an MFA, winning a contest, publishing with university presses, and getting a job teaching has been shown not to be a particularly good measure of anything—if anything, the many flaws and shortcomings [of that older route] have been exposed.

Poets have hacked the template—both literally, as they edited the HTML behind their blogs, and figuratively, creating alternatives to once-dominant modes and traditional publishing platforms. Frustrated that the established systems weren’t as user-friendly as they’d like, they’ve approached poetry publishing and poetic discourse in the manner of open-source programmers, improvising workarounds and frankensteining new hybrids. “

Amber eyes and hair of Scottish queen
Skin  of cream and lips for whistling tunes
She  made her  silent presence   felt and seen

Her artist’s eye was studying the scene,
Imagined and embroidered like a moon.
Amber eyes and hair of red flew free.

I can see her smiling and serene
As I wandered in from winter gloom
She  made her  silent presence   felt and seen

In her eyes, I never saw disdain
Only love which waited for its home.
Amber eyes and hair so  bright it flamed

Now we age, what part of us remains?
The eyes  still have  perception wide that blooms
She  makes her  presence   felt  but does not scream

Over us, the end of life may loom
Do not quit creation all too soon
Amber eyes and hair of Stuart queen
She  made her presence  fill the afternoon

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/prayer-my-daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on.  There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.
It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/deep-sworn-vow

A Deep-Sworn Vow

Unlike the noise of cars and phones
That makes our hearts unsteady  and solo
The   heart of earth  keeps rhythms which are its own

We can tune in to these undertones
Walk in time to music soft and slow
Underneath the noise of cars and phones

When I do that ,I Iive down in my bones
And marrow spreads more goodness in its flow
The   heart of earth  keeps rhythms which are its own

The flesh, the bones, the nerves  may sing or moan
What is it that makes us each mellow
Despite the noise of cars and mobile phones

Yet all we are is mortgaged or on loan
Not our houses but our breath that blows
To  the  heart of earth   in rhythmic  poems

We  can co-create with  those who grow
In tune with what all contribute unprobed
Underneath the noise of cars and phones
The   heart of earth  keeps rhythms it calls its own

Kissing eases stress and painful thought
I don’t know  the sample size they checked
But  blow a kiss whenever  love ignites

Kissing makes our eyes look very bright
Unless it’s what they call a little peck
Kissing eases stress and painful thought

A kiss can make our burdens seem more light
Enables us to empty worry sacks
So  throw a kiss whenever  love feels right

Love can heal dark  feelings that  destroy
And makes the world seem fairer and less black
Kissing eases stress and painful thought

Giving and receiving  bring insight
Helps us find the remedy we lack
So share a kiss whenever  love feels right

Every situation has its cracks
Light shines through, revealing the right track
Kissing  is more fun than idle thought
So  blow a kiss  and let your  love ignite,

The pain has come again to my lost heart
The ache of grief seems crueller in the night
As it was when  we were  forced apart

At first, the numbness made me loth to start
Yet like the  morning sun, I hurt with light
The pain has come again into my heart

I  listen for some guidance, kind comfort
To my inner self and wisdom’s might
As I knew  before we had to part

But guidance only  comes to those with art
To read the signs, and understand their plight
The pain has come once more into my heart

Death itself had beauty of a sort
As you went without struggle or fight
Wonder came, it seems we had to part

Why is pain so strong it seems to bite?
An anger and a rage it can impart
The numbness made my feelings dead and dark
The pain had come again into my heart

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/we-are-our-situations-poetry-christopher-gilbert

” I am
into small steps here—­I total the bits of me.
I have lived in countless places, childless,
without song, and now no church of time ahead
behind whose doors one can walk and be
transformed, enormous, again, and facing the sky.

This self becomes a tourist both displaced and situated in his displacement. Selfhood becomes an act of existential improvisation. Selfhood becomes as fluid and difficult as language. These are not difficult poems, but difficulty is often their subject: the difficulty of the gaps between selves, between being and thinking, between timelessness and time. They strive “to build,” as Gilbert writes in the poem “Turning into Dwelling,” “this language house . . . this loving which lives outside time.” The new collection’s title, Turning into Dwelling, underscores the ways the self is simultaneously restless and reflective in Gilbert’s body of work. His poetry makes “turning” both a motion and an act of transformation, and “dwelling” both a shelter and an act of rumination.

I am still, despite countless readings these last years, being introduced to Christopher Gilbert and his selves. He died at the young age of fifty-­seven on July 5, 2007, in Providence, Rhode Island. Graywolf Press published Across the Mutual Landscape, when Michael S. Harper selected it for the 1983 Walt Whitman Award. Harper was one of the first poets I emailed in 2010 to ask about Gilbert. He told me Gilbert had died of an “inherited kidney problem”; that as an undergraduate he’d studied with Robert Hayden at the University of Michigan. Part of me wonders how much Gilbert was shaped by his relationships with Hayden, Harper, and Knight. Gilbert, born in Alabama, was, like Knight, a southern transplant; Gilbert, like Hayden, was raised in industrial Michigan; Gilbert, like Harper, lived much of his adult life in Providence, Rhode Island.”

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/sick

“I cannot go to school today,"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
“I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I’m going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I’ve counted sixteen chicken pox
And there’s one more—that’s seventeen,
And don’t you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut—my eyes are blue—
It might be instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I’m sure that my left leg is broke—
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button’s caving in,
My back is wrenched, my ankle’s sprained,
My ‘pendix pains each time it rains.
My nose is cold, my toes are numb.
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow’s bent, my spine ain’t straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There is a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is—what?
What’s that? What’s that you say?
You say today is. . .Saturday?
G’bye, I’m going out to play!”

Shel Silverstein

Flee amidst the winter snow.
No little frowns in Bethlehem
Harlot’s ribbons for her hair
God didn’t fake the little-seen nipples.
I’ll love as ever deplored.
The snow laid roundabouts free.
Oh, hum all ye faithful.
As tested with day class.
We long to wee ah, oh!
Good pass, my love, you hit my gong
Greensleeves, ah, what a fright/save a bite
On Richmond’s pills, I loved no cost
Try an anti-depressant like loving your femur.
The Ten Commandments were God’s way of dropping a hint.Luckily Moses had a bag for the Tablet.
The Earl I loved was beautiful and so was old Soho.
Queen of the Bray
I loved an ass

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 passageway 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

Real and true, our feelings crushed give pain
Though beautiful dried flowers are shown much grace
Yet lying does not aid us nor does blame

Can we be kind and in kindness contain
The sorrow and oblivion of our place?
Real and true, our feelings crushed give pain

Do we fear to lurch  and be insane:
Lose our minds and live with that disgrace
Lying does not aid us nor does blame

The grapes are crushed and then made into wine
Yet humans tested cry for our embrace.
Real and true, our feelings crushed give pain

Dark our faces grow as if in shame
What has brought us to this awful place
Lying does not aid us nor does blame

Round the room all night I endless pace
Seeking  of the lost a tiny trace
Real and true, our feelings crushed give pain
Will we find the space  to play again?

Now I see the shadows on the wall
And in my heart. I feel the savage loss
Down I come, and with the dust, I fall

Once I scarcely saw the bad at all
And did not think of love and what it cost
Now I see the shadows on the wall

Down amid the weeds I find my call
And  mixed with dark green leaves I am compost
As down I come, and to the dust, I fall

Brilliance cannot last and life appals
In between my cells comes sudden frost
Oh, I feel the cracks within my walls

We  love between the lines with all we feel
Then broken by the cold we join the lost
Down we come, and into  dust, we fall

Must we live and what shall living cost?
Is it ours to judge the present past?
As I watch the shadows on the wall
Down  comes Love and  holds me as I fall

With my foolish love, I once fell for,
After words  seductive and sustained,
A man  who could not trust those he implored

Struck by anguish plain, I then desired
For love  to be rewakened and attained
With a new felt love, I still was for.

Like a worm or beetle on dirt floors
I took to earth to feel the dark again
Forget the man  whose trust was quite impaired

Nervous and uncertain, still unsure
I tried to find the measure of this pain
Caused by loving love   while immature

An agonising ache seeped through my pores
As if  I needed heavy violent rain
To cleanse me from the man who called me whore.

And  now I am appalled and to, ashamed
If we’re touched by love, it leaves its stain
With  ferocious grief , so undermined
I wander in the marshlands of the mind

Maybe death is somewhat like a birth
Forces from elsewhere possess our souls
And in the end, we all must come to earth
No need to work on any other goal

Who decides that one child must be born
Although it has not  grown for 40 weeks
And what a fear when from the womb it’s torn
We don’t remember as we could not speak.

Nature’s wild and lets so many die
As if like sperm, the eggs are well supplied
The well of tears will not like deserts dry
And we’ve lost  the meanings with our guides

As infants in the womb must not fear birth
Acceptance of sad facts brings happiness

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48422/aubade-56d229a6e2f07