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

Everyone Is Asking For Money

Everyone Is Asking For Money

A Blank Page

I was watching my beloved Kent sanding a lamppost he'd just put up outside.  The day was warm, the light was just right and there I sat noticing what a fine head he had...      

                 Love

Just finished tinkering with this old thing from 2013 (editing my "Swedish Book")        
          Mister Cause

This is a standing consideration of mine:  In fact, I've just rewritten it and dared to make it even stronger

The mixture of Vedanta, Hinduism and Buddhism that’s had a part in shaping all these years. Of course there have been other parts of this mixture, but this is on the board at the moment.

         A Bit Of Buddhistic Thought In Arlene-Speak

I’m still in nature mode.

         The Daffodils Are Out

Another April poem.  Am I obsessed, or is it April that is the catalyst?

A reminder of what April,  1997 was like in Sweden.  It's April 2019 and in my part of Sweden it's lovely.  
PS everybody!  This will go into my upcoming book "Swedish Book"  ☃️

       Waiting For Spring

I never intend to write and then….  reading something that moves me, I write.  Maybe that’s the secret behind this poet's produce!  Reading, hearing, seeing, thinking, reacting…

It happens sometimes that one hits the wrong button.  As in this case, I pressed a button (are they really called ‘buttons’?) which brought up a blank page.  Not knowing what to do with or about it, I started writing and this came out:
        A Blank Page

More Bits Of The Puzzle

Benda Starr reporting in with the latest news!

        Finally, A Black Hole Captured

This is a standing consideration of mine:

A Poet¨s Diary  ✏️⌨️

The Clock Tick-Tocks Your Socks Away⏳
                      (quirky but not funny)

The clock ticks like a wick downsizing in the dying:
Temporary, transient, here today and gone tomorrow.
Pastimes burrowed into passed times past,
One thinks of famous men and women, fired, admired.  
Mind gets tired, for they’re gone,
Their traces ploughed into the fertile, furrowed place beyond.
Cassavetes* and Columbo*; cancer and dementia.
Legacies of wizardry and yet, their own and grievous ends.
Death leaves a black hole - pointless, endless,
Llfe a mole (in every sense):  secret agent, blotch and spy.…
Gulf between ability and what is real:
The real causes in this wheel of cause/effect, effects so spread
It breaks one’s head to think about.
Life and end:
Serene or more than flesh can stand.
What’s left of name, what’s left of fame?
In a wink consigned to limbo.
What is left for one to do?
Desiring nothing, seeing through the great illusion:
Corwin’s view: nothingness of/ in the all.  
So do not cry but live the by and by with joy;
Pain of any sort’s a sore-ful, wearying and taxing bore.
Know yourself, and carry on, not with tons of worried hurry, but with kindly moderation.
Suns and stars - the galaxies are growing out, then easing off.
Continue pleasing you yourself
With coffee, for all coffers are but coffins — truth you cannot slough.
Habits sound, so as to lengthen years with scarce few tears and fears;
Apostle of benevolence to one and all in the small, small spheres of sway;
Continuing in doings that belong to each propensity,
Refining all the while, smile!

No Protective Language or, A Call To Arms
(found this in my email just now. I never remember what I've written, writing as much and as often as I do, and this seemed particularly appealing at the moment. I found myself thinking, "Gosh, that's good!")

I Can’t Tell A Joke, But…

Sometimes One Needs A Personal God

Once again, sitting in the bathtub cogitating

I was watching a reportage about the strong possibility of a war between Iraq and Kurdistani Kirkuk. I don't consider myself a political person, neither politically aware nor politically active. But sometimes, I'm moved on a deep level at the futility of and process leading up to war. This is one of those moments. I went directly to the computer.
March 27, 2019 Just 'found' this -'found' in the broadest sense since it's been on Facebook all this time. It seemed weaker than it must have felt when I wrote it in 2017. I've tinkered and re-written - with hopes that it's stronger.
You Can’t Have A War

Sitting up in bed, energy-less with toothache, I suddenly wrote this.  (Well, it took a while). Boy, the mind is a miracle!

        There’ve Always Been…

Just thinking…

If I Had An Editor

Do you ever feel like or identify with so and so?  

Sometimes Like Whitman✍️

Like Whitman, I love women, men,
Children, cats, dogs, birds, ants, even
Flies, bees, wasps - the things that bite
By day or night -
That come and go
As in the ego
Rlsing like a queen –
Pushy, domineering,
And between a humble nun.
Ego’s power’s a sneaky one;
Self-ness changing hour by hour,
Self-less self-ness into -ish-ness.
Sometimes I’m like Whitman:
Full of fullness or
A structure frail and faulty.

Sometimes Like Whitman 3.18.2015 revised 3.18.2019 Pure Nakedness; I Is Always You Is We; Arlene Corwin Nover

This was inspired by my friend Ulf who takes umbrage at my predisposition for rhyme and meter which he interprets as weakness. You ought to write prose, says he.

The Meaning Of It All: a race that is no race
(a poet speaks)
I may never be ‘streamed’,
(the modern stamp of popularity)
No theme alike in all I write,
For all I write is as diverse as hours in the day,
The changes taking place within the mind
With just one cup of of coffee
Or the viewing of a tragedy
On a ubiquitous TV.
Yet, with eyes to see
There is consistency,
A constant that is, let us say, a me,
A thread of personality,
Of pity for the way of, shall we say, humanity.
A love for the reality of life,
A search for its illusions,
And when seeing them,
A reaching for the answers.
And then the need to write them out;
A kind of scientific paper never absolute per se,
But sure there is a key
Even to death’s mystery
Which still eludes the me.
Wherefrom come this need to share?
Not fame, not name
Though they are protons in the atom’s lair.
No, the need lies deeper than the gene or cell.
A part of creativity and tendency to feel well.
A part of love that satisfies the giver
Just as much as it might satisfy receiver.
Desire’s hope gets in the way.
A hinder to analysis and objectivity.
Hope’s desire is the night to day.
Thus verse instead of prose.
One bouquet instead of one sweet aromatic rose.
Thus a freedom formed from discipline, revision;
Tiring and emptying until a moment’s inspiration
Jostles for first place:
A race that’s is no race.

The Meaning Of It All: a race that is no race 3.17.2019 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Circling Round Reality; Arlene Nover Corwin

Once again I’m sending this out to a) friends I’m seldom in touch with, b)  people I only meet on my email site who I suspect are interested or touched by this topic, c) friends who don’t have Facebook or never look at my site Arlene Corwin Poetry both .com and net, d) people I’m fond of who have Facebook but who anyway, I like to keep in personal touch with.  In other words,  all kinds of relationships I want to stay in reach out to.  
      As for the poem, I love it.  (You now how it is with a new baby).  That’s why I’m sending it at all.  Besides which, vanity, ****** makeup or not, affects us all, and we shouldn’t be fooled by it.  It’s not a good thing.

    TRYING TO MANIPULATE VANITY

Hello!  

TRUE CAFFEINATED CONFESSIONS: WHEN I'M HIGH
(one day some coffee company is going to give me a noble prize for all the eulogising poetry I've written to it)
You all know how one just loves one's morning cup of coffee!

Two Things Operating

I wrote this in 2002, revised and renewed it in 2004.  It is the kind of subject that has no ending for all that is still wrong and all that is yet to be done.  It is now 2019.  My former doctor has it framed and on the wall.  

To The Doctor Who Examines Me

Partly autobiographical, partly didactic, wholly spontaneous.    About a jazz singer, but meant to be about universal development      

         I DIDN’T DARE

I suspect it’s all of us.

THE DEFINITIVE BOOK

THE DEFINITIVE BOOK

To all my Facebook friends who have and do not open it, or my non-Facebook friends do not have it at all.   Also to my friends who have never opened my Arlene Corwin Poetry.com site but who I think might be interested in this speculation.

       Does The Universe Have Consciousness?

Hello!  

Seeing Globally

Yup!

     The World Is Full Of Words✍️

Yesiree!          

SELF-HELP BOOK

There's always more to think about and say.

A ZILLION WAYS TO HEAL YOURSELF✍️

I was discussing this phenomenon with a friend. Then, coincidentally, I found this on Duanespoetree.com (a great site, by the way) today. Like many of my 4,000 poems, I'd forgotten all about it. Suddenly, it seemed awfully relevant.

      I DON'T THINK I WANT FAME