Category: Thinkings and poems

Fascism: I sometimes fear…by Michael Rosen

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http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/fascism-i-sometimes-fear.html

I sometimes fear that

people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.
Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you…
It doesn’t walk in saying,
“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”

I shall milk the cow

My right hand is painful today

  I can’t join my hands up to pray

But rest assured now

I shall milk  the cow

That we bought yesterday on eBay

 

This voice  typing is  good on the whole

 I may even achieve my True goal

If I knew what that was

I tell you because

It may involve me going up  the  pole,

 

Owing to the arthritis which  afflicts me

I must mention it also restricts  me

I cannot walk far

And I have no car

Thank the Lord I can still see/wee/make the  tea/be

 

I sing of colour

Self help is a disaster says professor

 

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http://sciencenordic.com/get-better-life-say-no

 

Professor mimics self-help books

Brinkmann has chosen a rather unconventional way of presenting his points. He has written a book that resembles the self-help books he is criticising.

“It’s a self-help book with a humorous twist — you might call it a self-help book against self-help books. I wrote it like that to generate debate.”

In the best self-help book writing style Brinkmanns book has a seven step structure:

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius was one source of inspiration for Brinkmann’s criticism of the self-help and coaching wave. He was a Stoic and made a virtue of standing firmly as to who he was as a person (Photo: Jean-Pol GRANDMONT).

1. Stop soul-searching: From medical science we know that the more we try to feel, the worse we feel. The more we focus on our own health, the less well we feel. This is known as the ‘paradox of health’.

2. Focus on the negative aspects of your life: You have to acknowledge that you will gradually feel worse and worse and finally one day die.  If you bear that in mind every day you will value life more highly than if you spend your time constantly searching for something positive to focus on.

3. Say no: As an adult you have to be able to say no in order to maintain personal integrity.

4. Repress your emotions: It is a common psychological assumption that you become neurotic if you do not express your emotions. However, research is unable to confirm this. Physical illness cannot generally be provoked by repressing one’s emotions. There is, however, evidence that men face a slightly smaller risk of getting cancer if they do express their emotions. The reverse is true for women, but this is trifle

Far better to make friends with voices all

Oh tin bath dear I hold you very  dear
As by a hot coal fire, I wash my ear
Where Mum has got the water, I don’t know
As in the suds I sing  , I love you so.

For in the bath, our forebears also sang
As in the woods they lived with no broadband.
And after many years they  understood
They could talk   outside the bath of dirty mud.

It did not seem like dirt to  people then
As they were often travellers   with the pen
Cleanliness it relative, you see.
Some of us were brought up with grey knees.

But relaxation opens up our chords
And in the woods they bathed and sang like birds
Is it better shopping  the King’s Road
Or daubing all your family in blue woad?

As singing spreads the words each separate.
So every whispering can circulate.
After that,it’s voices in the head
And to asylums, we are swiftly  led

So if we  had stayed uncivilised ,unclean
Would our mental health have better been?
For if we do not speak in words and songs
The hidden voices would not make us wrong.

After all, who ever did decide
We are not allowed to hear from our inside?
Only words from  other  folk are sound
While voices in the head are cruelly blamed.

Far better to make friends with  voices all,
Than struggle through that boring shopping mall.
And don’t use power to label me as mad,
If looking at our world makes me feel sad.

The way through the woods

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The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods …
But there is no road through the woo

Is a formal poem akin to art

Is a formal poem akin to art
Or does it take the virtue  from my words,
And kill the natural feelings of the heart?

Music has its forms and so is heard
A frame around a painting gives it strength
Yet modern art defies the forms and blurs.

A book is not judged merely by its length
Although it needs a cover and a shape
We don’t have lucky dips into words blenched!

Free verse can be melodious in its sounds
Despite the lack of rhymes at  its verse ends
Expressive and harmonious  are its bounds.

In marriage once we had defined rules
The man at work to bring  a living home
The woman in the kitchen cooking fools.

Each found identity is patterned form
Yet rigid were the choices  now thrown out
And men  had too much power   which often harmed

Every trade  has  structures  which  we  flout
We need to learn the ancient ways we walk
Too much certainty can lead to doubt

 

Is a formal poem  expressive like an  art
Or  does it kill the  feelings of the heart?
Does  the tree of life grow  through my words?
Emptiness embraces what is  stirred

 

 

 

Oh frigid purse, I never meant to pay!

 

The sky  is stark ,the air is cool and still
The black cat’s  run,the birds unfold all day
I sit  down here and with my totty pray
Ye cast o’ foolish thoughts, you raped my  will.
We’ve  each enraged  the bureaucratic mill.
Oh  frigid purse, I never meant to pay!
The sky ‘s  a’spark,the air is warm and shrill
The saturnine demoted  knelled their way
With this feathered pounce, my sample quill,
I  cite the cheque and date it  for next May.
Oh,tit for cat, the tiger’s  bed ‘s astray.
Yer  life is settled by  a  harlot’s will
The sky ‘s a shark, the air is  sharper still.

Let deep green swallow me.

Oh,sweet my heart,let nature dissolve me.
In her  deep greens I am allowed to be.
While in the city  politicians cry
And from my lips I hear a solemn sigh.
Oh,foolish world that  foolish men are free.

What torment that we need society
And cannot dwell like birds in winter trees.
Or like the spider weaving webs defy.
Release my heart,let nature dissolve me.

The rich are common in momentous fee.
Unlike the insects and  the fuzzy bee.
For all of us, our end is ever nigh
Enchanted as the dove  that homewards flies.
Be comfortless in  notoriety
Oh,cease my heart,let  deep green swallow  me.

But I have none, so I will simply bite you.

O Candle from the strike of 75
I’m sure amazed to find you are alive
If I had matches, I would like to light you.
But I have none, so I will  simply bite you.

Oh, hoard of Andrex toilet paper
You will come in so handy later.
If I had room I’d hang you on the wall
Until I feel that certain nagging  call.

Oh,sugar,honey sweet I can preserve you
And for the upper people serve you.
Then as they  all go skowly diabetic
They’ll know  how simply sweet is your polemic.

 

We had these frequent shortages of  laughter
As we were not allowed to talk or behave dafter.
Yet  though we  have  designer kitchens splendid
I prefer  to gnaw on politicians languid

Like music or the menace of Al-gebra.

The art of  loving’s likely going to cost you;
Like  music or the menace of al-gebra.
Will you pay the price,I  need to ask you?

Remember all the lovers who have tossed you!
They say for stress ,to imitate the zebra
The art of  loving’s surely going to cost you

Will you let me , now I need to grasp you?
I remember your first  girl,that minx called Debra
Will you eat my food,I   have to ask you?

I wonder how I’d  feel if I had lost you.
Can I  save your image  on my camera?
The art of  loving, what’s it going to cost you?

I recognise,I know your shape and posture.
I want to steal your kisses;may I rob you?
Will you pay  full  price,I   have  to ask you?

I’ve  loved a million men but not a cobra.
Do I need a permit if I love you?
The tact of  living’s likely to  bypass you;.
Will you pay the piper, when I frisk you?

The friends who sit in silent company

The cause of sadness also shows its end;
That we let go the loved one and remain.
Such comfort,aid and love we have from friends
Helps us bear the heart’s most dangerous pain.

 

But if our friends  fear their own  hidden  grief.
If sorrow is never let to touch their heart;
Then friendship’s stolen by a nervous thief;
As wishing to retain our self,we part.

 

The friends who sit in silent company
Who look for no reward yet love us true
Who show,  quite clear, desireless empathy;
They are friends who warmth and  hope imbue.

 

Patient silence may do more than  words
The utterance of the heart is not absurd.

Silence in the company of friends

Sometimes silence is so sweet
We need no music other than its song.
But when we’re  tired and suffer a defeat
Then silence feels both threatening and wrong.

We need the company of other human hearts
But now we use our smartphones to connect.
This is where new alienation starts
We’re just a voice, a photo book ransacked.

So much is missed when we have no eye contact
No winks.no silent glances as we pass.
We lack the energy,so disrespect
Evoking rage by our behaviour crass.

Silence in the company of friends
Sings  its song whose  melodies are lent.

Being educated is more than getting “information”


Trying to understand:
in  an information culture,
evocation is more important;
explicit saying  counts against us.
People need to be well
into believing
being educated is more
than information:
the incoherencies
what they’re saying,
the musicality
of people’s voices
and intonations;
would get more
from them.
Effectively, psychoanalysis is
something other, not the coherences;
it listens for words
that are saying more
e,
t’s got something to do with  being;
it’s a form of listening,
not distracted by incoherence
but evoked by it.

Consummated with a kiss.

Sacred the  love the rose dwells in;
Thorns protect what lies within.
Precious flower designed for bliss
Consummated with a kiss.

Eternity is one moment
When chattering minds are each silent.
The warp and weft of life  itself
Has value more than human wealth.
So passive be, with patience blessed
Focus wide and all relaxed
We wait like this  with music ‘joyed
So quietly played, all hurt’s destroyed.

The rose by nature of design
Gives peace to both the heart and mind.
And so it is with this  green world
Of   blossom,  bush,  and petals curled.

In a storm  small  butterflies
Dance  in spaces small yet blithe.
Between the hailstones they will  live
And of themselves entirely give.

We too  find our sacred space
When with nature we embrace.
We  like flowers must grow and die.
We fall to dust and thus shall fly.

In the sunlight dust motes dance
As if by brightness full entranced.
We, like them ,do not compete
For  that love which us completes

For as we’re nothing,we are free
For God made you and God made me.
As we have no pride or will
We trust in One   who will fulfil.

Focus

night-scribbles
I used to wonder why desire was regarded as a bad thing in Buddhism.After all to be without any desire might be a symptom of deep depression..
But later I came to realise that if we are too focussed on our desire for one person or one object or one feeling that this sharp focus would prevent one from perceiving many other things.So perhaps it’s a change of focus that is intended.I can imagine that if you desire one person who may not be interested then you miss seeing all the other people near you.
Sometimes we have to use a narrow focus to do a task.In mathematics you’d expect a narrow focus but the reason why stopping and going for a walk works is that it widens your focus.

Can an angel change her name?

  • Dotty cats
  • Stan had eaten too much pizza because he was extremely ravenous from doing the washing. and hanging it up on the mulberry tree in his long garden Now he felt lazy and haphazardly fey and other worldly and liable to have visions..Now and then he saw an angel whom he called Yael in his home.But having looked up Yael on a website he realised she was not a very nice woman unlike his dear wife Mary.So he was planning a new name for the angel with her permissiom
  • Do you mind if I change your name,he enquired gently when Yael came in through the French window.
    Well,what to? Yael asked him familiarly
    How about Ysabel? Stan offered.It’s got just an extra b and s.
    Or how about,Sybael?
    You seem fond of b and s, the angel answered in confusion.
    It was just mere chance,said Stan somewhat defensively.
    Ok I’ll take Sybael,the angel said loudly .
    I want to change my name too, said Emile the cat of Stan.
    How about Mebiles or Melibes or Eimbles….
    I don’t know, pouted the cat haughtily.
    How about Semile,said Stan.Though it has no letter b in it, he bragged.
    They all pondered quietly as the sun shone in through the window and made a lovely lacy pattern on the wall.
    In came Mary,Stan’s sweet old wife and his computer aided extension too.
    You are very quiet,she murmured.What’s going on here ?
    We are tring to find a new name for Emile,Stan told her as Sybael waved her wings about.
    It seems very draughty in here,Mary said.And Emile can’t change his name because it will change his personality.
    I didn’t know I had a personality,the little cat purred.
    It is what is most characteristic of you.For example, if you always hurt those you love then you have a cruel personality or you have got diabetes.Some people want love but they are too harsh and demanding.
    So true,Stan added pensively.
    Anyway,I have some awfully strange news,Mary went on.
    You just won’t believe this but Dorothy Grey who lives at the bottom of the hill has just had a heart attack.
    How come
    She had an online love relationship with a rather peculiar but intriguing and clever elderly man who turned out to be a sadist in disguise.So when she ended it he flew over and attacked her with an air gun and some cat’s claws which he had bought from a cat market
    Is he a wizard,asked Emile.
    No, he flew on a stolen magic carpet from Persia.
    Persian carpets,I’d love one here said the cat greedily
    Actually it’s a kind of plane,said Stan.
    How boring ,said Mary angrily.
    Anyway Dorothy was so shocked her arteries spasmed and she is in A and E now on morphine,she added…
    What a shame that she got that instead of a spasm elsewhere….Stan muttered thinking of Freud.
    But who’d have sex with such a horrible old man? Mary asked.
    An equally horrible old woman,maybe? Stan riposted.
    Any way it all goes to show the dangers of online love, he informed the room.
    It’s not real love,is it, because in real love the other person is as important to you as yourself.Mary said theologically.
    Well. now Eros is a kind of love,too.But many old men just want their washing done and a companion.Eros has departed from their world.
    Sybael smiled and then flew out of the window.
    What was that noise, said Mary anxiously.
    Just an angel’s wings,said Stan quietly
    If only Dorothy had seen an angel instead of that harsh old man she might be much better now.Mary mused.But not everyone can see them.Their world seems full of horrible old men and beautiful young women
    Emile winked at Stan and then ran out to chase a butterfly amongst the scented tulips.. there were lots of angels there every day but only he knew.
    Angels don’t like big modern cities but they like old abbeys and cathedrals and places where such things used to be before post modernist architecture took over.
    And cat’s claws are not meant for scratching your loved ones either.And online dating should be avoided except with atheists and agnostics.They are less judgemental about women’s place and roles.It’s strange how harsh many religious people are.Harsh and unforgiving.

Word of the day:extremophile

whireisland

 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day

 

Definition

: an organism that lives under extreme environmental conditions (as in a hot spring or ice cap)

Examples

“Beetles with antifreeze blood, ants that sprint on scorching sand and spiders that live high up Mount Everest. These incredible creatures are the extremophiles: animals that survive some of the most inhospitable conditions on Earth, and sometimes even further.” — Christopher Brooks, BBC.co.uk, 26 Mar. 2016

“[Andrew] Czaja said research into extremophiles in general gives scientists confidence that life can exist anywhere where the appropriate building blocks, including a liquid medium (such as water) and a source of energy, exist.”

Did You Know?

No, an extremophile is not an enthusiast of extreme sports (though -phile does mean “one who loves or has an affinity for”). Rather, extremophiles are organisms—mostly microorganisms—that thrive in environments once considered uninhabitable, from places with high levels of toxicity and radiation to boiling-hot deep-sea volcanoes to Antarctic ice sheets. Scientists have even created a new biological domain to classify some of these extremophiles: Archaea (from Greek archaios, meaning “ancient”). These extremophiles may have a lot in common with the first organisms to appear on earth billions of years ago. If so, they can give us insight into how life on our planet may have arisen. They are also being studied to learn about possible life forms on other planets, where conditions are extreme compared to conditions on Earth.

Where metal walls echo the coursing blood

A strange and lonely feeling held my heart
Gripping like  some pincers  made of steel.
From my beloved I had had to part
Then  numbness  folded round me like wheel.

And quietness loved  has now turned into threat
Nero like ,I  fiddle with my  tunes
Pie Jesu’s not made top ten yet
Larks’ ascents aren’t worth much  to a loon.

I phoned a friend,her voice did me no good
It echoed in the chambers of my mind
Where metal walls echo the coursing blood
And escalate these feelings so unkind

Though he l loved has gone and is now dead.
I  see his face  upon my  heartless bed

 

 

Extract from a piece in the New Yorker

Donald Trump is hardly the first President to lie to the American people. Nor is he the first to place ideology before data. But this White House, unlike any other, has already crossed the threshold into a space where facts appear to mean nothing.

Eventually, the President’s daily policy outrages, his caustic insults, and his childish Twitter rants will fade into history. But it will take years to gauge the impact of having a habitual liar as President. When words like “science” and “progress” become unmoored from their meaning, the effects are incalculable. And let’s not kid ourselves: those words today are under assault with a ferocity we have not seen for hundreds of years.

The United States is now a country with dozens of unofficial government “resistance” Twitter accounts. There is one for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, another for the Environmental Protection Agency, and others for the National Park Service, the Peace Corps, and the Customs Agency. Last week, in what the account describes as an effort to present “actual facts, instead of alternative facts,’’ they were joined by the nation’s most important public-health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are horrific lies of omission: last week, the White House released a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day that pointedly declined to refer to Jews, because others were killed, too. And there are denials of truth that are impossible to categorize: the President met with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an anti-vaccine zealot with a history of falsehoods, and talked to him about possibly forming a commission on vaccine safety. (After Kennedy said he’d actually been asked to lead such a commission, provoking dismay, the Trump team said that no decision had yet been made.) Then there are lies so ludicrous that it is hard (though essential) to take them seriously: according to Trump, the United States has just gone through the most devastating instance of voter fraud in the nation’s history. And, in his telling, every one of the millions of illegal votes happened to be cast for Clinton

Be unhappy

two-of-us-more

 

Don’t Worry, Be Unhappy

“In social situations, gentle negativity seems sincere to me. And it can require courage. “If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all” we are taught.  So being negative risks, at the very least,  social censure. Of course, nobody needs a stream of unsolicited, unvarnished truths–everything in moderation. But many times, negativity is either effective or, at the very least, an honest expression of a different take on the world. No harm done.

Actually, in a weird way, being negative also implies movement, progress, to me. If everything is good, nothing needs to change, and then where are we? Settling for good enough, lacking goals, gettin’ fat on the couch.”

Artificial

Diagonal streams now  stripe the windowpane
And in them, tiny insects drown and die.
Unexpected ,sudden rain  has come.
Those escape who have  the wings to fly.

No angels were seen peering  at my  room
No doubt they have their  Sunday wings to press.
No  camera ,even with psychotic zoom,
Can catch an angel while she is undressed.

Now the rain has dried and all is sweet
I tend to houseplants standing by the door.
By good luck these houseplants never bleep.
Only in the real world do they flower.

Bleeps and pings are not a natural sound.
But to the artificial   we  will bound

Like  the haze of opening leaf buds in spring time….

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I see a haze of hair on your head
like the softness of just opening leaf buds in spring.
The chemo is over,and you wait relieved and letting that
take you for a while before you start to face the next stage.
Will your Spring turn to a warm enchanting Summer
or has the cancer,as they say “spread.”
Just for now,you’re in that lull
so in three weeks time you will not be
arriving for another session of drugs
and days of sickness.I see the light fuzz which reminds me
of how the cat’s fur grew back after her surgery
and she,being unable to reflect or question,
leaped from the fence top onto next door’s kitchen roof;
no thought in her mind of stitches breaking.
How beautifully the patterned fur returned
and the vulnerable skin was covered again.
Oh,to look into those eyes and see you dream
about mice that live behind the shed
and how you sat watching for hours
and how you were alive till the very last moment.
Then , all of a sudden,you were gone.Pray it will not be so for ,the fragile,loving human
now waiting and living,hoping for what you took for granted…
a  “normal” life span Or maybe just three quarters of one
would be satisfactory;would be a beneficence
such as trees feel when the sap turns and begins to flow back.
bringing life out of the darkness of earth and soil.
And another Summer comes at the right time
and we find it,shall we say,satisfactory.

Blown away with your smoke

 ???????????????If I go I won’t tell you.

I’ll just disappear one day.

Like when a cigarette ,which seemed so long,

suddenly has become smaller

and you never noticed it

because you were talking

about the meaning of life

while life was somewhere else

blown away with your smoke

into the sky

and then dispersed

never quite visible again

but still floating on the breeze

hoping to be caught

in a butterfly net

but unable to communicate

except by flying.

If I go it will not be today

but it will be an ordinary day

no one will realise

that it’s that day

that the bird flies

from her nest

to go to a new place

only seeing the deserted nest

he realises,

my bird has flown

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