More humour from Imram Yusuf
You can guess correctly I am in love with this man
More horrifying than Brexit

The fight is now against something even more horrifying than Brexit
Extract
It is hard to know where to begin. We saw, with each passing hour, the all-out assault on democracy from an unelected prime minister lacking any majority; the explicit politicisation of the monarchy; and the hollowing-out of parliamentary sovereignty under the auspices of giving parliament control. We realised that Johnson genuinely does want to force food and medicine shortages on his own country in the name of the people. With Ruth Davidson’s resignation came the final elimination of any vestiges of one nation Toryism and the implicit acknowledgement that the Union would no longer be saved. We warned in 2016 that Brexit would spell unintended consequences. Not in our worst nightmares did we imagine what they would actually turn out to be.
What not to say

EXTRACT
3. ‘You’re so sensitive about everything.’
“‘You’re so sensitive, you always get upset over everything.’ It makes me feel as if I shouldn’t have emotions or I should just turn my emotions off. So I try to hide them but they end up building up until it just explodes out of me.” — Sierra G.
“‘Well, stop being so sensitive about everything, or you won’t last long in this world!’ Thanks. Exactly what I need to hear when I’m already feeling like something’s wrong with me.” — Selena W.
4. ‘It’s time to move on now.’
“‘Just move on!’ My baby’s father said this to me one month after I gave birth to our son stillborn when I was crying over the loss. He couldn’t understand why I still cried over my baby. It hurt me so bad and I will never forget that.” — Meli M.
“‘It’s in the past, let it go.’ [After] coming out, finally talking about what happened growing up and liberating myself from keeping it bottled up… [hearing this] is a slap in the face, and makes me shut down and avoid people at all costs.” — Nikki M.
Keeping us distracted is the game
While the people fought a civil war
The level of politeness was bizarre
Old men opened doors and kissed my hand
Young ones tried to knock me to the ground
Keeping us distracted is the game
We shall be consumed by anger’s flames
So dictators get complete control
While the eyes of Syrian babies roll
If they were made of marble, they would sell
Throw them down the ghoulish wishing well
After two world wars we all must know
Starting’s easy, unlike letting go.
Raise your eyes, don’t focus on the crowd
Look up to see dictators break their vows
We must invade France
Is Boris Johnson British? Who cares?
Extract
The former London mayor is the great-grandson of the Ottoman Empire’s last interior minister, Ali Kemal, and his ancestry has been a source of pride for many Turks.
Despite his sometimes disparaging remarks about Turkey, including a crude limerick about President Tayyip Erdogan and demands in 2016 that Britain veto Turkey’s accession to the European Union, Johnson is affectionately referred to as “Boris the Turk” by some Turkish media.
“Ottoman grandson becomes prime minister,” read a front-page headline of the opposition newspaper Sozcu. “For England, a prime minister with roots in Cankiri,” it said, referring to Kemal’s home province in central Turkey.
Embarrassed to be British
Are you really British?
Such gentle words can break our sullen bonds

A word that’s spoken by a friend can reach
Can touch, can move, can embrace in its sounds
The inner soul where its vibrations teach.
When cut off, silent,after sad defeat
Such gentle words can break our sullen bonds
A word that’s spoken by a friend can reach.
We must not torture nor torment in speech
Our heart, the centre of our morbid wounds
The inner soul with its vibrations speaks..
From our eye, a tear springs with relief
From imprisoned sulking, jump with a great bound!
A word that’s spoken by a friend can reach.
Muscles weaken,but the mind stays fleet
Humour and its cousins are our clowns
The inner soul by its athletics speaks.
I smile and smile yet rarely do I frown
For I will rise up, even when low down
A word that by a friend can reach,provoke
In our souls ,deep memories will evo
Death of democracy?

Our new PM is suspending Parliament for 5 weeks.I would not have believed this could happen here.Watch out you immigrants,Jews,Muslims. the handicapped, the old,foreigners [ who is foreign in London?]
Boris Johnson seems hard and cold.Maybe he is Icarus……… who knows?
.
We got it in your mouth but it was hell
I was in a dark and evil place
Having seen the blackness of your face
You had no trousers on your thin old legs
Sitting in a chair beside your bed
I sat down, you collapsed onto my breast
Your blood was out of oxygen at last
The nurse came running with some sugar gel
We got it in your mouth but it was hell
I had to help him lift you to the bed
You never spoke, I wondered were you dead
He said that you must eat which was bizarre
You were semi conscious as you glared.
A doctor came from calling 111
He said you got pneumonia,by gum!
He rang 999 and then he left
The paramedics ran in, I dismissed
I waited in a little room with chairs
An hour passed by,I pulled out my own hair
Then at last they pulled the curtain back
You were on a trolley like a sack
Your voice was stronger and right then you said
Oh, darling, I’ll soon see my mum and dad
Be wary of BP lowering pills
About 4 weeks ago I went to a walk in Medical Centre, thinking I had an infection
I was right.I did have one.But this doctor insisted on giving me pills for high blood pressure despite not knowing me at all.I was distressed about the behaviour ot someone who won’t return my door keys
Anyway, about 10 pm I felt odd.I went into the kitchen ] then guessed I might faint and managed to kneel down before I went unconscious.I came to and thought I was not injured and despite my face being black and blue the next day I was not hurt
I got a locksmith.When he saw my face he asked me what happened.He offered to call on the person who has my keys but I did not want him to do that
In the end it proved useful as he fixed another key and adjusted the doors.
So beware.Don”t do like I did.Ask your own doctor first before taking new medication
God won’t mind, he knows well we are flawed
Oh, my electric carpet sweeper I adore
It never grumbles as it sweep my floors
It sounds so quiet and gentle as it drags
Dust and bits of wool from off my rugs
I’m astonished how much dirt if gathers in
I examine it with awe beside the bin
I look to see of there is any gold
Just as Freud the prophet has foretold
I found three pounds, enough to buy some tea.
I like tea in bed as I come to.
Escaping from my dreams as from a Zoo
Am I odd or am I just like you?
Even kitchen tools can be adored
God won’t mind, he knows well we are flawed
The Window
The bane of my life
Radical= what?

https://www.google.co.uk/search?safe=active&source=hp&ei=MWxlXbqZLtGm1fAP2NGsQA&q=radical&oq=radical&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l10.1306.3568..4557…0.0..0.68.442.7……0….1..gws-wiz…….0i131.EOJZU3heNPo&ved=0ahUKEwj69aixzaPkAhVRUxUIHdgoCwgQ4dUDCAc&uact=5
radical
/ˈradɪk(ə)l/
adjective
-
1.(especially of change or action) relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.“a radical overhaul of the existing regulatory framework”
synonyms: thoroughgoing, thorough, complete, total, entire, absolute, utter, comprehensive, exhaustive, root-and-branch, sweeping, far-reaching, wide-ranging, extensive, profound, drastic, severe, serious, major, desperate, stringent, violent, forceful, rigorous, draconian “radical reform is long overdue”
noun
-
1.a person who advocates thorough or complete political or social change, or a member of a political party or section of a party pursuing such aims.
synonyms: revolutionary, progressive, reformer, revisionist; More -
2.CHEMISTRYa group of atoms behaving as a unit in a number of compounds.
Extract from politics and poetry

As radical as empathy and imagination can be, these qualities exist in the mind. But there is also a poetic language of embodied experience, one that uses poetry to seek out the body. In “Feeld,” the trans poet Jos Charles bends language, via willful spelling, to a place where it must be parsed slowly, struggled through, read not so much with the brain as the mouth. Language becomes a felt thing, a terrain to be crossed. The title itself toys with such a transformation, the word feeld being a marriage, perhaps, of feel, felt and field. Reading lines like “i care so / much abot the whord i cant / reed / it marks mye bak / wen i pass / with / a riben in mye hayre,” I can’t help feeling that the body — itself a shifting and malleable possibility — is the target for these poems.
Through the strange labor of deciphering the text, I come to understand that Charles is transmitting an experience that I must allow to travel from her body into mine. When I do, the distance between us alters. It grows smaller and strangely charged. I’m made to realize that the very vernacular of the poems also tampers with history; it announces a continuum where Chaucer and 19th-century enslaved blacks and a 21st-century white trans woman seem quite effortlessly to share a lexicon.
Justin Phillip Reed, whose “Indecency” received the 2018 National Book Award in poetry, writes close to the flesh. His poems take up the body in desire and violence, and they do so by thrusting the reader into a stark visceral encounter with their material. The poem “Portrait With Stiff Upper Lip” is graphically rendered so that it can’t be read line by line; the page must be turned, repositioned so that text, overlapping and running every which direction, can be seen. Beyond typography, the poem asks the reader to take on the physical and emotional sense of a black man hearing himself, or someone like him, discussed via fragments. A reader staggers through a field of statements like “looks like planet of the apes” “probably has / a huge” “probably has a parent” “in / prison” “NO” “[in / the / pen]” “I’ve never had” “with a really hot BLKguy.” The reader, dragged forward yet afraid to keep reading, is made to feel caught in a hostile gaze, shoved around by heedless voices.
Politics and poetry
I saw your soul like that of a wild bird
Someone other guided me to act
Deep inside my voice had been unlocked
I sang the psalms and then a lullaby
Not aware in thought that you would die.
I fed you with a teaspoon the mashed fish
From a plate as good as one might wish
Like a little child you tried your best
You winked at me and gazed like one who’s blessed
You sat up with a brighter face at last
Then lay back and God knows all the rest
Oh, don’t go yet ,my darling,I am here
The floor of heaven came down among my tears
Made of sumptuous satin golden,dear.
For a little moment it hung low
Then it rose and took you in its glow
I saw your soul like that of a wild bird
Taken by the Power who sent the Word
A sheet of tears fell down from my closed eyes
It’s hard ,too hard when those you love must die
Just watch a single leaf as it unfurls
What kind of camera shows the changing light
Upon the yellow blossom as it waves?
The wind has dropped ,the breeze is here, but slight
And on the flowers I in languor gaze
The red leaves of the acers now unfurl-
Two side by side but different in their glow.
The light accentuates them as they curl
Gives them time to unwind and be slow.
Without the breeze the colour varies less.
It’s flatter, less like Monet, yet still bright.
And as a grey cloud sags across the West
It puts my dreams of colour into flight.
Yearn not for special tools to catch the world.
Just watch a single leaf as it unfurls
The Irish border with English police WTF
‘Bloody hell’: English police could patrol Northern Ireland border after no-deal Brexit
Despite a wealth of history suggesting that it’s a very bad idea, UK politicians have reportedly devised detailed plans to deploy English police officers in Northern Ireland in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
The heron seems to smile
The heron seems to smile upon its prey
Why did God make this bird be that way?
Could it live on grass and bits of moss?
I guess it is the protein it would miss.
We do much worse things than do the birds
We damage other people by our words.
We also steal more money from the poor
Even when the hangman’s at the door.
No,I don’t feel guilty being rich
It seems that I use money as a crutch
I’ll give my winter coats to Charity
I’ll dress by drying leaves fresh off a tree
I’ll get a little couch inside the shed
And hear the beetles laughing in my bed
I guess a beetle will not know my name
Just like men, oh, dear, are they the same?
Poetry and the Reformation

Photo by Mike Flemming copyright
https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_RHR_2261_0032–from-reformation-to-renaissance.htm
Extract
Two undeniable facts remain: the Anglican Reformation did not actually lead to any form of poetic engagement nor did it produce the sort of politically inspired poetry that is associated with the French epic poems of Agrippa d’Aubigné.[1] One of the rare exceptions was a sonnet by Milton “On…[1] It was not until the beginning of the seventeenth century that the first poems bearing the spiritual influences of the Reformation appeared. This is a result of the transposition whereby England is neither the birthplace nor the promised land of the Reformation, but a significant hub where the continental prototypes were adapted under Anglicanism and subsequently exported in its new idiosyncratic form to the New World, the chosen land of the Puritans. A complete overview of the subject would also include the Puritan literature of New England,[2] See Perry Miller, ed., The American Puritans. Their…[2] but this would merely highlight the rarity of poetry amongst a generation of pragmatic colonists, who were far more preoccupied with establishing permanent settlements than making an epic gesture that would aggrandize them in the eyes of all posterity.
6
However, back in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century, poetry was undergoing a reformation. The long reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) was conducive to political stability, to the flourishing of the arts, and a literature enriched by court poets such as Philip Sydney (1554–1586) and Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), who embroidered versions around the myth of the Virgin Queen that were both epic (The Faerie Queene, 1590–1599) and pastoral (Arcadia, 1590). At court there was a throng of fine and erudite minds whose rhetorical education drew not only on the Greco-Roman culture brought back into favor by the humanists, but also on the Bible, the core text for the schools of rhetoric based on the reformation of knowledge initiated by John Colet (1466–1519, a friend of Erasmus and Thomas More, and founder of St. Paul’s School in London). Many of these poets were no longer alive when the translation of the King James Bible was published in 1611 (Sydney died in 1586, Spenser in 1599). Nevertheless, as humanists, the poets were highly knowledgeable and were able to translate, gloss, or imitate the Psalms without fail.
7
By the time the great metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw) provided spirituality in English poetry, with its real momentum during the first years of the seventeenth century, these rhetorical exercises around the Psalms had already become great classics, thus allowing a young poet to shape his style through his juvenilia, before embarking on original creative works. Thus, the English were initiated at the same school as Racan, Corneille, and Racine, or again Gryphius and Angelus Silesius. In addition to Sydney, it is worth noting: the Scotsman and Lutheran George Buchanan (1506–1582), author of a Latin Paraphrase of all the Psalms (written in 1566), a work which was re-published twenty-six times in the course of one hundred and fifty years; the court poet Thomas Carew (1594–1640) who wrote his paraphrases in English; and the sacred epigrams rendered in Latin by two metaphysical poets, the Anglican George Herbert (1593–1633: Passio Discerpta – Rendings from the Passion, and Lucus – the Sacred Grove) and the Puritan-born Catholic Richard Crashaw (1612–1649, Epigrammatum Liber, 1634). All these examples are in fact more interesting from a linguistic rather than a stylistic point of view in that they are the last remnants of neo-Latin[3] See Pierre Laurens and Claudie Balavoine, ed., Musae…[3] literature of English origin. Having left these schoolboy exercises behind, a seventeenth century English poet would henceforth write in his mother tongue, and especially so when he sought to move nearer to God.
8
Why then were these poets so drawn to the Psalms? It was not particular to the English, but to the very essence of the Reformation in its most profound form. By making the human voice heard with its full spectrum of contradictory emotions, they opened the way for lyricism, which had already been heartily encouraged by the devotia moderna, promoting the individual piety of the layman through the ideal of the imitation of Christ (Low Countries, fourteenth century). Subjectivity then would know no bounds. It would be possible for every human being to seek in the voice of David the accents that corresponded to his own voice and then to cry in wonder: “Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one,”[4] John Donne (1572–1631), Divine Poems, vol. 1, No. 19,…[4] and from this torment draw almost unlimited poetic inspiration.
9
Amongst human nature’s innumerable contradictions carried within this voice, there is the clash of a resounding paradox: to allow humans to speak enables the voice of God to be heard more than ever. What the Reformation poet seeks above all is a dialogue. Perhaps it is the fear of being crushed by the Calvinistic theory of double predestinationism, which would have God isolated in a state of transcendence so distant, indeed so remote, that any communication with Him would be threatened. God would surely then become a complete alterity, to be approached only with fear and trembling (Luther), for this God might only manifest himself in the form of some spiritual death sentence, like the prophetic writing on the wall telling Balthazar of his imminent end.[5] See Rembrandt, The Writing on the Wall, The National…[5] The hope of salvation (revealed in the inamissible grace of the conversion) transforms a person into an anxious lookout, forced to watch relentlessly lest he be blind or deaf to the signs that God may send to make known his will.
The soul becomes transparent as it sails
As the heart grows weaker, memory fails
The home familiar made itself feel strange
Although he smiled at me, he was too pale
As the heart grows weaker, so perception fails
The soul becomes transparent as it sails
Through the heavens with its candle flame
As the heart grows weaker, memory fails
The home once known, felt odd, he fled his cage.
Stan and his mistress
Stan is feeling low and sad
His good wife Mary has gone mad.
Stan is feeling Guilt and Fear
He knows now that it’s wrong to leer.
Stan has been a naughty boy.
He let a mistress with him toy.
But Mary found his mobile phone
When she was at home all alone.
His mistress lived next door to him
Which made it simpler for to sin.
While Mary worked hard teaching maths
The lovers lingered in the bath.
He was meant to do the chores.
Chopping wood and painting doors.
He had to bake the cakes and bread.
So the household would be fed.
But Stan into temptation fell,
As did his neighbour Anne as well.
They enjoyed so many hugs,
And lying down on woolly rugs.
So, Mary, she was most appalled.
She screamed and yelled and cried and bawled.
So Stan has gone for therapy.
What sort of changes will he see?
He lies down on a long brown couch.
Behind which the therapist crouches.
He says to Stan,”now let it rip.
I want your mouth to be unzipped.”
Was your mother kind to you?
Did she train you on the loo?
Did she wash yopur mouth with soap?
Was she prone to sulk and mope?
Stan thought this man verbose.
So he kept his own lips close.
When he got the bill to pay.
He told the therapist,”No way”
“You have been the one to talk.”
He glared like a crusading hawk.
“You should pay me,not I pay you!”
What was his therapist going to do!
“I’m glad you’ve managed to speak out.
Your sanity is not in doubt.
I’ll tear the bill up for this week.
And next time I want you to speak.”
So Stan unleashed his every thought
Just as the Freudians once had taught.
I don’t know how he feels inside.
But language is a useful guide.
And as he sees his therapist,
His mistress is not greatly missed.
He wanted more attention,
So now his bad ways are all gone!
He got a part time job as well.
So he could pay his therapy bill.
Mary is still teaching maths.
And now it’s she with whom he baths!
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He helped the homeless, addicts and the scared
My many sins in marriage were disclosed
He taught me Chess,I won, he was annoyed
Yet did not tell me till his dying days
He must have sulked to cover his dismay
All at once he poured out my mistakes
I was too brilliant for a man unwise
Who married me because I had blue eyes
I knew the villain when we watched TV
Now I see the true villain was me.
Yet he seemed most learned as he spoke
His weighed his words that helped so many folk
While I struggled teaching maths, it’s hard
He helped the homeless, addicts and the scared
Then I cooked his dinner, fed the cat
Fit for nothing much,I darned my hat
Now all that I assumed for forty years
Hid his anger when I thought he cared
Was our love a play within a play
I held his dearest hands, he passed away
Mother’s song
He smiled at me so broadly I was mazed
He thought I was his mother,not the case
He asked me where I’d spent my honeymoon
I don’t know.Oh Scarborough,flowers bloomed
Why did your boss sport a wooden leg?
He got in in the war, he lost his head
Mother you look stunning, on he smiled
Where is Dad? I’m sorry, he has died
So why have you not married since that time?
He gazed on me entranced, and not by rhymes
No-one ‘s asked me yet;he seemed surprised
Never mind that, is the washing dry?
Mother, now you ‘re blessed with big blue eyes
I felt so sad,I would have sobbed and cried.
If it made him happy,was I wrong
Being like a mother till the end?
Marriage holds a breeze but not a storm
Would you be more gentle,dear,I cried
She’d pushed my head as if it were a stone
I only want my hair washed, not to die
And BTW why are you using Tide
Shampoo is much kinder,on I moaned~
Could you be more gentle,dear,I cried
I ‘m glad you don’t use Ariel, suicide
She wrote about the Moon, her love and home
Did she want her hair washed, not to die?
In Spain she bought sardines so she could fry
In the wilds of Devon left alone
Ted was getting famous, not his wife
I re-enter time ,I let her dye
My hair is purple rinsed from the white foam
Did Plath want her hair dyed, not to die?
Marriage holds a breeze but not a storm
The rose had pricked her finger with its thorn
Could we be more gentle if we tried?
We all need human love or we will die
He kissed my hand,I knew what was afoot
He kissed my hand,I knew what was afoot
He followed me on Facebook every day
I get these butterflies inside my gut
I never fall in love with porn or smut
Or men who ask me out to make me pay
He kissed my hand, I knew what was afoot
We went to Lyons cafe, it was shut
We fried an egg and ate it in our way
I got those butterflies inside my gut
I could have made it funny, should I flirt?
He ate my buttered toast like it was prey
He kissed my hand, I knew what was afoot
I did not lead him on, for it might hurt
He had to be the one who led the way
I got no butterflies inside my gut
He kissed my hand and asked me to a Play
He wrote it all himself, my fiance!
He kissed my hand,I knew what was afoot
I tell a lie, I never said I would.
In my heart I still yearn for his gaze
In my heart I still yearn for his gaze
In which I lived, felt real and was engaged
Critical, he did not always praise.
In my soul I still desire his gaze
Driving through bright summer fields all day
Flowers exquisite yanked me from my page
In my heart I still yearn for his gaze
In which I lived, felt real , and was engaged


