The Best Thing  I Know

The best thing I know
Is to scribble down longings, life’s wrongings,
Love’s singing,  its stinging…
By letting the mind re-examine itself;
Watching world going by while in bed,
At its head, sitting silently gathering info
On news fact and mail,
Nailing knowledge on some tricky wiki- or so.

Christmas will be here in only some days,
A new year announcing a new phase
Of conflicts world-wide and world round;
Science will stumble upon some new ground
It has searched for for years,  
Praised and surprised, encircled by cheers.                                    
Fashions and trends, starts and ends will go on.
I will write into night seeking thoughts to dig into;
Unknown and new, cued by visualisation:
Thoughts to set words (not set worlds) afire,
Freed from the mire
                             of frazzled cliche.

The best thing I know
Is to grow through an intellect
Coupled
With Mac so fair,
Happy it’s there.
We’re a pair.
The Best Thing I Know 12.19.2020 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative  II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Cosmic Coordination.  

(4 years later)
Meter righted, verbs re-chosen, rhymes clearer, form tightened, economized and easier to read;
even message and its nuance altered
 
Moment ‘now’ can never come again,
Not poetry, not inspiration;
Angle, viewing never contain the  prefix re- (again).
Moments have a nano-difference, nano-variation -
Two sided coins
Joined by rows of nows.
 
Moments have no measure,
No more import one the other –
Value too.
Does sitting on the loo
Have more significance than any other thing you do?
Same dance, same chance, just nuance new.
 
The instant used for what it is:  a one and only,
Friendly, sunny or tsunami —
It, unique and passing.
Yet not random or haphazard.
Influences, guides that sway –
You need to take them,
Soaking up the many ways.

Remember, be aware,  
You also guide and shape and sway
From where you are, for you have power,
Synchronized with galaxy and star
And all the spheres that ever were.
Coda:
Not to sound too know-it-all, sententious
That’s the way it is!
Cosmic Coordination 12.18.2016/ 12.19.2020 Nature Of & In Reality; Circling Round Reality Arlene  Nover ‘Corwin
sententious
given to moralizing in a pompous or affected manner: he tried to encourage his men with sententious rhetoric.

Abstinence

Not pain exactly
But a longing, plain for me to see;
A need that has no outward symptom -
None.  Not one.
Brain tristesse invisible and humdrum.
What to do? Is one a freak?
That hour, that day, that week one speaks,
One acts, attends to facts;
A seeking through an abstract dance -
Dependence through aloneness.

Publicity? More company?
Eternity perpetuated through some poetry?
Anyway and somehow, one puts pen to paper.
One, two, three, four hours later,
Crossings out, Webster shouting all the time,
Searching for meaning,
Meaning’s teaching, fetching rhyme:
Through growing phrase and sentence.
Abstinence finds absence.

Writing in that playful way,
One knows one’s had a lot to say.
The silence that gave abstinence;
Was abstinence from muteness.
Abstinence 12.18.2020 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

You Have Only Yourself

You have
Only yourself to work with;
Bathe, clothe, soothe;
Live in and save.
A self you cannot leave, for
There’s no other
Over which you have a power.

It’s you who breathe,
Must learn to love, forgive -
For you deserve it.
Your achievement
One that chiefly comes intuitively -
Fief, belief that comes from faith,*
Its roots in something beyond earth,
Bequeathed
From some external source,
Its course also discursive,
Non-intrusive yet conclusive.
You only have yourself
Enwreathed with instinct’s highest drive
To do it with
                    and for.
You Have Only Yourself 12.17.2020 Revelations Big & Small; Arlene Nover Corwin

fief;  a person's sphere of operation or control.
discursive; proceeding by argument or reasoning rather than by intuition.

An Urge Is Not A Wish

I have no wish to write.
It is an urge I can’t resist,
And so,
Not only do I not desist -
Not slowing down, but speeding up,
The whole accelerating,
It invigorating,
I encourage this particular urge large!
(syntax queer, I’m aware.
rhyme peculiar, but it’s there!)

An urge more subtle than a wish,
Ranging from the brush to flesh.
I urge you all to keep the wish,
Examine urge.
If good to let it surge,
Become an act that serves,
I wish the very best for you.

An Urge Is Not A Wish 12.11.2020 A Sense Of The Ridiculous II; Arlene Nover Corwin

When I read this to my husband, no, discussed the thank theory, he mentioned a whole list of things I would never think of…sun, nature, family, friends, sky (not in that order) and I realised more than ever, it’s all about priorities and whatever takes first place in your mind and heart.
       I suppose as long as you feel a thanks at all, that is the essential, for so much of life is suffering.

                Thanks

Thanks for the consciousness
Of vitamins
And maintenance
Of health;
Things keeping me alive
At eighty-five.
We will not mention the mistakes
Made out of ignorance
And vanities.
But anyways,
Thanks for the consciousness,
However small,
Of learning concepts:
Words that smell of wrongdoings and weaknesses
That lead to nothing gained
                                          and pain.
Thanks for brain, mind, love,
The mysteries shaped from above
Revealing selves from day to day:
Gifts, middling or developed, held up;
Musicality, culinary, long-time waiting;
Gifts from genes and fate
For which one can’t claim credit.

But with gifts come debit:
Karmic debts that must be paid from insight,
Dis- illusion, self-deceptive strengths and loss
Of will and energy to toss them out,
Swapping every wrong for right.
Thanks for seeing through the scrap, the traps
To late night insights.

Thanks for indispensables at fingertips:
Food, clothes, warmth, which list goes on
An endless on and on:..
The value of philosophy - of having one;
Of having fun, but seeing through it.
Thanks for/to the comfy bed I’m lying on,
The pillowed back support for writing from,
The little knowledge in this bank, this little think tank;
For this writing - Thanks!
And Thanks!
Thanks 3.6.2020/edited 12.8.2020 Pure Nakedness II; Circling Round The Universal; Arlene Nover Corwin

Bass Deluxe: Ron Mathewson

Bass stands against a wall.
A singing, dear, expensive bass
Unused and tall,
Its agoraphobic player on a chair he calls his ‘throne’,
Alone, with daily cigarettes,
Watching TV, living in, on the touring pasts.
Half understanding - just half understanding
How great and talented he was.
Perfect recall, perfect pitch
All he broods about is what he’s done -
What was attained long, long, long, gone.

Life’s contradictions:
Great gifts. great restrictions.
One feels the ache of disappointment:
Talent that resigns from life with that great depot of accomplishment,
Finely filed on disc and film.
Not to be bettered, that bass with its singing-ness.
Like men of genius gifts and neuroses,
Ron’s bass was divine, a mine of nuances,
Shades, silken tones, harmonies endless.
That sensitive ear!  What chords he would hear!
Phrases he’d play on!
A multi-boxed crayon.
He could pluck, he could bow .
Did his intellect know why, what, how?
He just did it!

The box of wine, that pack of smokes.
The emails, phone calls, stockpile of anecdotes;
Remembered peers, recalled remarks,
The names of tunes leaving their marK;
The taste and technique, the recall
Combined, his all.

Yet all that one can say
Is that one of the ‘chosen few’
A treasured, master jazz bass player
Lived his last day
On a Thursday, 3rd December, 2020.

Bass Deluxe: Ron Mathewson 12.9.2020 Vaguely About Music II; Birth, Death & In Between III; Special People, Special Occasions; Arlene Nover Corwin