Hello world! Though written in 1997, how I love this one (Happen to find it while editing “Swedish Book”).

.          Collapsing In On Itself
  
A week-dead pike on local stone wall,
Placed there or dropped by some passing seagull
And ignored; once fresh and full now meagre and dull,
Is almost the same as the day that it came,
But entrails have started to go.
(Are they ‘entrails’? I don’t really know.)
Of course it has innards; the roe, liver gall,
And I’d guess there’s a stomach.
It think it’s a pike - maybe perch, not a haddock!
The thing that’s essential, its cardinal what-ness
Is something that shows now whenever I to pass it.
Everything rotten or heading that way,
Falls in on itself in its terminal rot-ness.

Collapsing In On Itself 8.16.1997/revised and amended 5.13.2019 Swedish Book; Circling Round Nature; Birth, Death & In Between; Nature Of & In Itself; Arlene Nover Corwin

Don’t Copy Or, Have I Said This One Before? ✍️

When I write I try to not write what I’ve writ
The months before, knowing that
Each three clichés, each thrice said phrase
Is hinder to the mind’s synapse.

Used-up words five times five hundred,
Never wond'ring why I’ve done it:
I don’t want to copy -
Least of all myself and me. 

Falling for the trick that quickens death of brain
Are quirks and quips and bits of what
You’re sure has happened, quoted over, over.
Mind’s a rover needing change.

I have friends who still say “weird” to amplify each seventh word;
“Weird” since nineteen eighty-four.
What it means I’ve no idea.
And what is that word  ‘weird’ good for?
Change the words,
For copying yourself is worst.

Am I copying my back life story?
Parroting, regurgitating clichés,
Making up my history?
Faking mystery
To make myself exciting?

Copying is weakening
For you, for me, for memory.
Variety’s the key.
You do not need to copy.

     PS There’s a red line running through our lives: character, aptitudes, permanent throughout.  Bones grow up, grow old and change.  Penmanship changes.  Underneath there’s always a youyou recognize.  Keep it in the frontal lobe.  It’s there.

Don’t Copy 3.1.2015/revised 2.3.2016/ re-revised 9.27.2018 Definitely Didactic II; The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Feeling frisky!  I love this!

You will excuse a small vanity, I hope.

I just happen to be God oriented.  It often provides the best language for me. To my non-God-oriented friends, this is as much a comment on 'our times and culture’ (the name of one of my books, book two to be edited sometime in the future) as it is a God thing.

I Used To Be
(an ageing jazz pianist/singer observes)

By coincidence and AFTER writing this poem I read “Kings of old, rich in virtue and in harmony with the times, nourished all beings”.* WHAT a coincidence, eh!

              A Well-Functioning Society

The people are the goal.
But that includes the whole:
Their health, their wealth, their psychological well-being -
Familial, emotional: their simplest needs met,
That, until their death.
Simple but not easy.

How do you make people giving?
How do you secure their living?
How do you reduce a greed
That goes much further than the need?

Then how to teach a folk to share?
You cannot preach a folk to sharing.
Propaganda and brainwashing only go so far.
Though faith goes to the furthest star,
Well supported,
It can also be perverted.

Think, dear reader near:
Meditate and contemplate,
Work through a restlessness
To inner peace, acceptance, patience.
Answers lie in your own essence.
Every thought and every deed spreads in a sea,
Rippling out eventually.
A well-functioning society
Begins and ends with me.

A Well-Functioning Society 5.4.2019 Our Times, Our Culture II; Arlene Nover Corwin
* I Ching; Richard Wilhelm translation