When true love’s gone and doom hangs over head

When life runs like a river to the sea

Then shall I take new lovers to my bed?

And with their carnal touch consoled be?

When my love lies,so breaks my tender heart.

When life seems grey and rocks bestrew my path.

Then, shall I my life of evil start?

And on the world shall I bestow my wrath?

When true love lies and wrecks all loyalty.

When puzzlement makes all my world seem mad.

Then I shall upend causality

And let myself do deeds which make me glad.

For I have love’s sweet child inside my soul

And I shall tend her till at last she’s whole

The gravity of loss brought me to earth
Beneath the rotting leaves, I lay with worms.
I wondered if I were of any worth

No more to be enchanted by love’s mirth,
I  with unnamed particles was turned.
The weight of loss bears down the heart to earth.

I could not rise alone but saw a path
While I slept  new unity had formed
I learned I need not think of what I’m worth

My sorrow brought no guilt nor fear of wrath
I am both  eagle and  a twisted worm
In my little grave, I  loved the earth.

Like the adder, shocked into rebirth.
I from silent underworld had learned
Not to judge my soul to be of worth.

I shall not  fear the flames of hell that burn
When blackness is accepted, may one learn?
The weight of loss breaks down the soul to earth
With dusty shredded leaves, we then converse

Blogging about God has created a problem for me

“We are not in God’s hands.  We are God’s hands.  It is our job to take this world as we find it and make it better.  In general, I think those who are inspired by God are more active than others, but there are many, many exceptions.  Oxfam, my favorite charity, is thoroughly secular.

What is God doing in the meantime?  I like the answer ofCharles Hartshorne.  God rejoices in our joys, and sorrows in our sorrow.  Lots of people seem to think that a God like that is hardly worth worshiping.  My answer is that if you want a God of infinite might, then you are worshiping power, not goodness.

Jesus Christ

I’m a Christian, and so I’m expected to think that Christ was a great event in history.  I do, but not for the usual reasons.  Jesus Christ is not my personal savior (whatever that means), but I don’t think he was just a wise teacher either.  The story of Christ is the story of a God who allowed himself to become human and suffer as humans do in order that he might know more about us, his creation, and so that we can imagine a God who is not all powerful.  In other words, God became human so that he could know us, and we him.  If so, then basic human standards of good and evil must apply even to God.  It’s good to worship God because God is good. Just not all powerful.

Lots of people, probably the vast majority of Christians, believe that Christ was never fully human, for he performed many miracles.  The Nicene Creed says Christ was both fully human and fully God, which doesn’t really help. The Gospel of John treats Christ as though he was just pretending to be human.

What’s so great about Christ’s journey is his vulnerability, his willingness to be forsaken and humiliated as only a human can be.  The Old Testament, as Christians call it, has most of the great Bible stories, but the story of Christ is a really great story, particularly if we read it not primarily as a promise of salvation, but as a story about God’s limits.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46) Who could say this but a God torn in two, doubting even himself for a moment?  As all of us, including the most tenacious, have doubted God.  (Christ’s cry is not just a reference to Psalm 22; he was not teaching Bible studies.)”

You who with your serenading
Won my love and took my heart
Come now to the assignation
When   both you and I  shall part

You who with your humour loving
Gave affection and delight
Oh, now let me see you  coming
Just once more,to then depart

After birth and after losing,
We must grow without insight
Nothing knowing , nothing choosing
We are led to darkness bright.

Dear All

I have to write this as and when.I have just found I can do hundreds of courses free on Open Culture.So I shall not send any presents this year just a guide to which courses you might like.
Well.I went out this morning and caught the bus.Not in a fishing net,ahah.The driver was very nice.I can’t recall much more.Anway Robert has asked me to buy some more makeup.Either that or he will leave home for ever.The problem is finding the right colour.The lady in Boots thought I was Ivory but it made me look like a ghost.So we settled on beige.Bloody beige.Pardon me,I hate beige but had to agree it covered up the many strange spots and marks I have acquired.If only Rob had bought me a silk pillow case 20 years ago,how different I might look.He said he’s never heard of them
I propose 2018 should be the year when all married men or lovers are forced to study fabric,sheets, and other niceties.That will give me a chance to steal Rob’s tools and his models and see what I can invent.
To give you more news,my son is going to Russia for a holiday.Better than the West Bank,ahaha.I hope.I see that WP uses the term Palestinian Territories as we have the honour of a couple of readers from there.I may write bad letters but it takes their minds off the Bedouins’ schools being razed to the ground,as it were.Why should Bedouins go to school? They were in the Negev before schools were invented.Oh,dear.
My daughter has just got a Ph.D in Anglo-Saxon.I wonder what kind of job she will get? Serving in Lidl’s? Washing fruit in Holland.Who knows.Maybe she will publish her thesis and it will sell like Harry Potter.Though few people in Britain can understand Anglo-Saxon despite that they are English [ so they claim].So I guess she will have to write a novel about bondage like Shifty Shades of Mauve.I do like mauve very much.It looks lovely with my blue lips and eyes.I have a mauve dress and some pyjamas.I judge by what I see here in the Town that pyjamas are acceptable for shopping in when topped by a fake fur coat or a faux acrylic biker jacket.
I don’t know what my husband would think if I wore those kind of things.He bought me some blue tights once.He said there were no blue stockings.I was glad as I hate suspenders.
It was hell menstruating with those and the gigantic brown knickers with irremovable hard bits where blood refused to come out of the fabric.Of course, the Bishop forbade us to use tampax as we would lose out virginity.How daft can those men get?Alas,very daft indeed.How can a Bishop know what it’s like to bleeding menstruate when you have to hide all the rubbish till the men go out and then we had rush in and put them on the fire.They didn’t do much good to the fire.I ask you! It shows that Christianity is nothing to do with Jesus.It’s concerned with blood,death,virginity and secrecy.What does that tell us? I don’t know either.It was hard washing those knickers and we only changed them once a week.In those days we still had pubic hair and as baths were bad for us,we could lie in bed picking off the dried blood clots unti day 7 when we had a bath.

I seem to have wandered away so I shall leave you here waiting for more thrilling feasts of words… look in the free dictionary.
I have to polish the kettle and kill some flies now.Then decide on my pudding. Yoghurt, tinned fruit or a walnut whip.Or rice pudding with raisins and cream set with gelatine in a mold and turned out onto a big plate.Until we eat it.It won’t last long here.Not like that boring old tinned custard and prunes.Who ever ate a prune willingly? The constipated pain wracked patient, that’s who
Cheers

Kristy and cat

Where do we draw the line, who has the power?
The man who offers actresses a role
If he can take them and their little flowers

Or is the  beauty of a woman  soured
If she thinks men ‘s behaviour rather droll?
Where do we draw the line, who has the power?

As from the magazines, dour faces glower.
As women all across the Western world shout “foul”
He can’t possess them or their glorious flowers

We like to blame the victims,girls not ours
They should beat men off with metal trowels
Where do we draw the line, who has the power?

And in the background, secret rapists cower
They live by proxy hearing victims howl
They can’t love  or  touch the  hidden flowers

All across the world, men like to prowl
If only they were dogs that merely growled.
Where do we draw the line, who has the power?
Here is the daftest man who self devours!

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46568/planetarium-56d2267df376c

Daily Telegraph:Hurricane Brian

There was a  programme on TV last year about the Jews who survived the Concentration Camps.One was a man  whose mother was about 17 when she was released.She married and he as born when she was 19.He’s been having psychotherapy for 40 years.
So we wonder can those few European Jews ever recover fron their collective trauma.Of course Jews had already been murdered  or massacred in many other places.
But from a different perspective,we might ask,have we the Europeans recovered from learning what evil we could do to  other human beings? Or have we repressed it? Certainly the Jews already in Britain were safe,Yet many were turned away,And Germany,France,  and other “highly civilised” countries seemed happy to ” cooperate ” with the Nazis.Surely we have not accepted  our guilt.Nor done much to come to understand how these things happen

I was taken aback,shocked, by hearing a friend say with relish, if the Muslims don’t watch out we will treat them like the Jews were treated.As if that were a good thing.
I think one factor is that many of us don’t know many Jews and even if we do, would  we talk like that?
Taking it at a  personal level, if we injure someone they have to recover in whatever way they can,but don’t we?To admit we have deliberately hurt someone is very  hard.And in doing that we have become a different person.To recover from our actions,how do we do that? Because we are harmed by doing harm to others.We don’t recover by mere Confession and Absolution.
Virtue is its own reward is more meaningful than we may  think.I find I do feel better if I don’t send the angry email  or if I refrain from gossip.We must not take it so far that we let others injure us, though,And boasting of our virtue is not a bright idea.
Has Europe ever recovered from a  century of wars and murder on a scale previously unimaginable? I think not.
Can it recover? I don’t know

https://www.bestvpn.com/wpa2-wifi-not-secure/

“Is It Time to Panic?

Yes and no. This is a very serious vulnerability, which affects almost every WiFi user. It makes all our data insecure and could be used by malicious actors to launch wide-scale disruptive attacks on online communities.

On the other hand, there are some silver linings:

• Attacks can be carried out only in close proximity to a WiFi network. The fact that remote attacks are not possible will necessarily limit the amount of damage that a malicious entity can do.
• Connections to HTTPS websites remain secure. This almost certainly means sensitive data such your bank details, online shopping details, and emails are secure.
• Connections protected by a Virtual Private Network (VPN) are secure.

It should also be noted that some devices are affected worse than others:

• Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) and Linux devices are particularly badly affected, as they’re also vulnerable to an additional bug. This results in the encryption key being rewritten to all-zeros, which makes it trivial to hack.
• Windows and iOS devices are the least badly affected because they implement WPA2 in a non-standard way (that, incidentally, violates the 802.11 standard).”

“

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. -Leonardo da Vinci

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/why-teaching-poetry-is-so-important/360346/

In M and S they have got full-length nightgowns with long sleeves and cowl necks.So it seems that while we can go out in jeans and T shirts, we will go to bed in what looks like a nun’s habit.~
I often wondered what was the habit of this nun?Biting her nails. beating  unmarried mothers? Going gambling in dens of iniquity?
Anyway, seems to me this nightdress would be just the thing to go to Tesco’s in if you waken up  at 3 am worried you have no cauliflower ears left in the house.
They also are selling cashmere dressing gown for £199.Seems like modesty and wealth are on the rise.You could have fooled me.I can tell you it’s cheaper to go to bed naked except it’s awkward if anyone rings the doorbell.
I wear a nightdress in summer and two in winter as I can’t have anything heavy on top of me like a thick duvet.
So if you have arthritis or you have no heater wear more clothes in bed.But not the ones you were to go out in.Some people wear thermal underwear in bed.Rather cruel if you sleep with a lover but you might find it turns them on and that will warm you up!
If they don’t like it ask them to buy you a cashmere and silk.That will be a test of love!
I can’t stay here writing all night.I have to wash up.
Cheers

How like a jail, this wooden cubicle
Where I am paid to sit and calculate.
Since my ambition was more musical
The lack I feel aids Satan and his mates

All day I enter figures into rows
Or into columns vertical and neat
The walls seem  nearer and I am disposed
To get my coat and race off down the street.

Yet I need the money  to pay rent
To buy my food and go to Southwold Pier
In truth it is like Hell and I am bent
By living as if nothing true were here.

I need to find the space in my own mind
Where dreams can linger till I am less blind

Before you send that email,stop and muse
Do not shoot the arrow poison tipped
Why so hurt a friend for differing views?

The vulnerable, the lonely,how we choose
To  pass the suffering on, in words encrypt
Before you send that email,stop and muse.

When we do evil, we our virtue lose.
See  mouths down-turned with narrow tensed up lips.
Why gravely hurt someone  with differing views?

You may have got a match,don’t light the fuse.
Might you be more  gentle,  less abrupt?
Before you send that email,pause to  muse.

Earth may burn and  human hearts may freeze
Does that mean that we must be corrupt?
We’ll stretch our minds instead to hear all views

Our dear heart,our own sin will corrupt
We will suffer  most from our descent
Before you send that email,stop and muse.
Why gravely hurt yourself when you can choose?

1.Listen properly when people talk to you.
2.Only talk about worthwhile or funny topics.
3.Never seek revenge or retaliation
4 Hug people if it is appropriate
5.Reveal,don’t hide, your love.
6.Remember people can’t read your mind
7 But your body language can often be read
8.Show respect to others.
9.Some people are hard to relate to and it is probably not entirely your fault.
10 Some people are too weak to apologise.Don’t be one of them.

Unnoticed is that moment seasons change
Summer heat seems vanished in  a day
The early darkness  startling,eerie, strange

From the golden sun sadly estranged
Grief descends , we miss our flowers and play
Unnoticed is that moment seasons change

The long days  give us time to take the stage;
Time to go out in the evening air.
The early darkness  strikes us, eerie, strange

Like a thrown ball  falls from height of range
A turning point for gravity  lives there,
Unnoticed is that moment seasons change

Now our seasonal clothing is exchanged
Out come hats and coats in colours grayed
The early darkness  seems  less eerie, strange

Oh, we cry, come back  those glorious days!
We’re like children,  who for sweeties pray.
In  a  single moment, seasons change
Into  darkness, our own sun is plunged

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/27/robert-mccrum-books-walt-whitman

“In the absence of an explanation for Whitman’s creative leap forward – was it, perhaps, the fruit of his service in the civil war as a hospital orderly working in terrible battlefield conditions? – most biographers have retired, baffled. Even Whitman’s champion, the sage of Boston, RW Emerson, seems to have understood that this extraordinary new voice had undergone a mysterious and secret gestation. “I salute you at the beginning of a great career,” wrote Emerson, acknowledging Leaves of Grass, “which yet must have a long foreground somewhere.””

“But the ruthless cut-off of 40 does not address the complex trajectory of creative growth: for every novelist or poet who explodes skywards with a first or second book, there are many who only achieve mastery as they reach the shady side of the slope. The onset of middle age, or the approach of oblivion, is perhaps as sharp a spur to literary effort as the intoxicating self-belief of youth.

Daniel Defoe completed Robinson Crusoe just before his 60th birthday, after a turbulent life as a journalist. Mark Twain published Huckleberry Finn aged 49. Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov in his mid-40s. Closer to home, Mary Wesley launched The Camomile Lawn at 70. Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn, this year’s American literary sensation, a Vietnam novel of astonishing power and insight, worked on his manuscript for 33 years and finally saw it published in his 60s. He now enjoys rather more recognition than the Oxford poet Craig Raine, who has just published his first novel, Heartbreak, aged 65.

The artistic provenance of these late bloomers will be as complex as Whitman’s, but I think Dr Raine’s title gives a clue to one common thread: these books are invariably love stories, in the broadest sense, inspired by a person or a memory – in Twain’s case, of the Mississippi – for whom the writer calls up one final surge of creative energy.

Dear Madam

Your poetry is disgusting in parts and feeble in others.I  have read a load of rubbish in my time but yours takes the biscuit and the cake too.To coin  a phrase at this moment in time
I regret I have wasted five years trying to understand it and you,  for when I read a book about post modernism  I realised understanding is very bad and there is no absolute reality at all,So you don’t exist and neither do I.
So you need write no more.
And as stamps are so expensive I can’t afford to post it except here on your blog.I must be you and you am I.
Otherwise I could not do this at all.But logic is not so useful now.Telling lies is the latest fashion,Well, when was it not?
Yours sincerely

The lady in the shed with the candle.

PS Why don’t we have electricity in this shed? I can hardly see with the honeysuckle all over it,I need to see the Light

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/triolet-poetic-form

The sky was tinged with children’s ecstasy
The  well iced cake with candles lit and paid
Unknown, the mother’s kind perplexity
The sky was flushed with children’s ecstasy
But she prefers the blue ,the rhapsody
The poem of love, the verses strictly made
The sky was blessed with children’s ecstasy
The  well iced cake,balloons ,lost serenades

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.agorafinancial.co.uk

In dark rain, our boundaries ached and blurred
The colour from our coats wept into air
As solid being was  most times deferred

The scraps of wool made street grids get all furred
The colour of the water was unfair
In dark rain,our boundaries ached and blurred

Some wear  nylon coats as they prefer
Non-leakage despite nylon  fabric tears.
Solid being;indefinable, deferred

Our coats and then our skin shed  leaving core
In heavy rain  our organs displayed bare
In the rain,our boundaries shook and blurred

If we had a choice, we said no prayers
We did not speak and no-one seemed to care
The right to be, definable, deferred

What is human when we  choose to wear
The watercoloured raindrops in our hair?
In dark rain, our boundaries softened, blurred
Solidity  and being thus deferred

What strange selection have those parties made
That Trump and Clinton are the chosen two.
In disbelief ,we stumble, thinking frayed.
Such strange selection have the people made
Their Presidential choice ,discussed, displayed
The Reign of Night,Oh Hell, what can we do?
With strange dejection, people stare dismayed
For neither Trump nor Clinton was the clue.

I don’t want to change myself for you
Who are you to judge me heart and soul?
If you don’t like me,it don’t make me blue

You can’t  take me over like you’re flu.
Who are you to think we make a whole?
I  refuse to change myself for you

You’re more  trying than a crossword clue
Your nature is like ice with a bad cold
If you don’t like me,it don’t make me blue

Don’t stick your hand to mine like superglue.
You’re lacking when  you think you’re being bold
I will never change myself for you

The cat is dumb,the parrot’s  stole its mioaw
My heart fees good,my spirits glow like gold,
If you don’t like me, it don’t make me blue

My heart is free,the blockages dissolved
My life  and mind have suddenly evolved.
I would never change myself for you,
If you don’t love me,it don’t make me blue

1.Wear fleece nighties or pyjamas.As it is a kind of polythene  or plastic  I find they dry quickly when I give them their annual wash
2.Get an electric blanket or an electric lover.
3 Put freezer bags on your feet in case you go to the bathroom.You must not leave footprints or they will know it was you in there 5 times in the night
4.Wear a hat. I’ve just bought a reflective one.I think a lot in bed,you see.
5.Put your coat  on the bed or on you.
6.Have a hot wink before bed
7.Count backwards in sevens from a thousand.A thousand what?I don’t know!

If you feel cold, the Independent suggests you wear a jumper.Or, why not put  cardigan over your shirt? This is just so useful I am struck dumb.~

More advice:
1.In winter wear a woollen vest and socks.
2 Why not wear your winter coat inside your home to be really original?
3.Sit in the public library all day for free heat and newspaper and  use their loo to save   your water and  toilet paper.Yes,it is wrong to steal their soap.
4 Go to bed in two pairs of pyjamas and a dressing gown.Then you can look original and stay warm.

 “What do you get if you leave two Jews alone in a room?  Three opinions.”
Why are Jews so intelligent? Because they have Jewish mothers
Why  do Jews  like arguing? What’s wrong with arguing?
Why did Jesus walk on water ?To keep his feet clean
To go by a  more direct route
He forgot  he was meant to be on Earth
For fun
To see if he could.
He  didn’t like running on it.
To see if it was hot or cold
He got  sea sick in boats.
He wanted to make us laugh
He couldn’t swim
He  was just showing off.

“How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one’s own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn’t this had some effect on my life as a militant–has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?”
― Antonio Gramsci”

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

• Quaderni del carcere, « Ondata di materialismo» e « crisi di autorità », volume I, quaderno 3, p. 311, written circa 1930
• English translation Selections from the Prison Notebooks, “Wave of Materialism” and “Crisis of Authority” (NY: International Publishers), (1971), pp. 275-276.
• Prison Notebooks Volume II, Notebook 3, 1930

Gently dancing in the sun
Small flowers grow;
they bloom,
are gone.