By the way, I'm Arlene Corwin Poetry.com also.

      I Get These Offers✍️

You Become Whatever You…#2

Based on an email.

     Things To Do In Times Like These

Enforced by climes,
Potentially creative times
For those indoors; creative hours
Using things of daily use
To make you happier than usual:
Training, both to get and keep
Your strength and flexibility;
Practicing a hobby’s pleasure;
Art of leisure;
Cooking from ideas not tried, new acquired -
Meant to eat and cure at once;
Lance the boil spoiling all the current toil;
‘Things’ each physical and mental,
Incidental and essential.
They but ‘things’ - activities.
Not only there to ‘live’, but please.
No matter what, life’s there to please,
The ease not always easy.

To give to you some things to do
While undergoing a non-boring
Squeezing out of this disease
By seizing on a life of things  
To do small things in times like these.

Things To In Times Like These 1.28.2021 Our Times, Our Culture II; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

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!")

The Case For Upper Case

I am traditional.
Each line I write
Starts with a capital.

I’ve gotten slurs,
Have had to plead my case
Give reasons for…
Well, can’t say more:
It looks right, feels right, lights my fire.
Capitals inspire!

Upper case to start a line
Seems to define a poem
As does a rhyme and meter.
And it seems to me, a writer/reader
That the message is delivered stronger,
More aesthetically and stylishly
Than when composed and written out
In form that’s free
Of commas, brackets, sentences,
Spelling, colons (and the semi-…)
All the marks that clarify,  
Unifying all and any…

Upper case in verse
Is not a race or contest
To see who is best.
Upper case is, in this case
A quest for knowledge,
Autobiographic collage:
Search and synthesising:
To  two eyes that just may realise
A Self and what’s behind:
The mind and whatsoever else I find.
(Or should I say whoever else…).
But never mind,
I face the upper case dissent
With quiet acquiescence,
And perpetuate, to celebrate
Tradition.

The Case For Upper Case 1.12.2020 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

4:07a.m.  Under the covers.  Flashlight for light.  Handwriting definitely going to look unreadably shaky tomorrow.

           Slowed Motion

Slowed motion
Gives you time to feel,
Time to observe
Instead of reeling round with verve
And upset nervous systems
Setting up a curve
That lead to nemesis.

Slowed motion is a key
To subtle brilliancy and insights
On dark nights
When flights of fancy
Fake and take…

Stomach squeezed, stomach breathed;
Jiggled hips, wriggled toes;
Who knows what?  Perhaps the nose;
Elbows pressed: in, out, back, down,
Leading collarbone to fast become
A flattened beauty, which in turn
Moves shoulders, both, the one
For-, backward, in- external.
Hands supporting or at rest,
Pushing so that biceps harden.
And if you are working best,
Triceps also get their job done.

Nature’s principles in push and pulls.
Burned calories, earned benefits.
Stretches, creases,  pulls, releases
Worked on in their opposites.
Managed slowly, consciously,
The slowed down works to our advantage,
For the language of the mind
Likes one thing undistracted, done,
And that, alone.

Opposites attract
And that’s a fact!

Slowed Motion 3.31.2020 Circling Round Yoga II; Circling Round Experience;  Arlene Nover Corwin

Sorry and sad that this comes out of my brain again, it does at the moment,  for among the ubiquitous money orientated TV competitions are the ever-present newscasts with their on-the-spot reporting.
     As usual, I’ve worked and reworked this to produce a piece of art.

              Chaos & Teargas II

Chaos and teargas
Now choose and viruses once again,
When
What I want is to pass the years
Without the tears, awful fears
In place on a crying face.
How to, It being an end you want too:
All of, each of you
Out there,
Wherever the chances and choices have placed you.

With nearly the yearly Thanksgiving
For most of us living in peace
(Rewriting in March)
Exposed to the chaos while sitting as such,
In chairs or on couches -
Not crouching or fleeing,
Pursued by policemen or soldiers,
We miss being fodder.
How lucky we are!

Suffused with the anger and violence
While eating our turkey and cranberry sauce,
Exhausted and worried
From scurrying youngsters,
Flurries of gangsters & burying mothers…
Smothering gases of withering fires,
And masses of dawdling, dithering leaders,
Chaos and teargas the emblem for hire
We, worn out and tired,..
And now it’s the virus dear readers,
From all of this chaos that rages and grows,
And nobody knows how to stop it.

Chaos & Teargas 11.17.2019/revised, rewritten 3.1.2020
OurTimes, Our Culture II; Arlene Nover Corwin

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

Mid- Night Nonsense

It’s good to start from nowhere
In  particular,
Let it grow,
Intuition’s urging knowing.
The trick is to keep going -
That’s the hard part.

4 a.m. husband asleep,
And like a twelve year old, I creep
Under the quilt.
With minor guilt, pad, pen in hand,
Keyring flashlight, writing,
Fighting hard to stay awake
For art’s sake.

There’s no other explanation,
So amusing is the situation.
There will be continuation -
Or, as Arnold coined,
“I’ll be back”… joined to you
Post breakfast, and as promised.
Not just brain but body too,
Then we’ll see if this needs closure
On exposure to the light.
As for now, goodnight, goodnight!

Mid- Night Nonsense 9.16.2020 Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

Approaching Eighty-Four

Circling Round Everything #2
                  2018

We Who Keep Writing

I listen, read and look,
The world around a book.
This simple observation
Stimulation.
To one linguistically inclined,
As Swedes say,
“It lies ‘in the spine” *
Another way of saying,
In the gene or DNA.

This Facebook thing,
The many, many sites that ring,
Communicating, reaching out
To those of us who think and write
In words
Are worlds of benefit and benediction.
So-so intellect and talent
Notwithstanding.

We who carry on,
Persist, keep on
By virtue of some motivation
Indivisible, invisible,
Yet Siamese twin
Are blessed without, blessed from within.
This tiny verse took 15 minutes.

We who Keep Writing 3.28.2021 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin
* (for I live in Sweden)

Rhyme, Meter, Punctuation

Rhyme, meter, punctuation
Help to clarify
The explanation/situation
Sitting in the poet’s eye,
Growing there
To share with unknown others.

Rhyme and meter; punctuation
Put in order the occasion,
Make it easier to question, reason;
To arrive at some conclusion.
An idea kept in seclusion
Is not happy on its own.

We created language
As a telephone.
Rhyme and meter; punctuation
In the  the genome.
Verse in form; verse informed:
A condensation of the all,
Dependent on the mind-sized wall.

Rhyme, Meter, Punctuation 1.22.2021 The Processes; Creative, thinking, Meditative II; Definitely Didactic; Arlene Nover Corwin

The Good Ethic (a)

We have to have good leaders
Upright, ethical.
Leaders who, role models all,
Rather than distort the word
Would, if a situation called
Fall on the situation’s sword.

Tidal waves, cracks in the earth,
Lava, outbreaks at our teeth,
Pre-set, present, hard to say,
What’s needed to de-threat
Probabilities that link mortality:
A changed morality,
And from the start, start
Well before calamity
Starts rumbling.

It can’t, does not take much to just not cheat.
Susceptible, corruptible,  unreachable
Can suddenly become  impeachable.
Bleating, leaders,
Grumpy, tweeting…
Ought not take much to delete
A leader’s grumbling, tweeting, bleat.

A man of trust is what we need;
Whose only beads come not from gods
But from a creed of noble hearts.
The Good Ethic 4.25.2020 Defiant Doggerel; Our Times, Our Culture II; Arlene Nover Corwin

      The Good Ethic (b)

We need, must have good leaders
Upright, ethical.
Leaders who, role models all,
Rather than distort the word
Would, if a situation called
Fall on the situation’s sword.

Tidal waves, cracks in the earth,
Lava, outbreaks at our teeth,
Pre-set, present, hard to say,
What’s needed to de-threat
The probabilities that link mortality
Is changed morality,
And from the start, start
Well before calamity
Starts rumbling.

It can’t, does not take much to just not cheat.
Susceptible, corruptible, unreachable
Can suddenly become  impeachable.
Bleating, leaders; grumpy, tweeting…
Ought not take much to delete
A leader’s grumbling, tweeting, bleat.

A man of trust is what we need;
Whose only beads come not from God
But from a creed of noble heart.
Simply defined and hard to find
We miss the ethical of mind.
The Good Ethic 4.25.2020 Defiant Doggerel; Our Times, Our Culture II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Paradise Lost (Can’t Let It Go)

Many Hours, Many Days

So many wonder, many ask
About the writing: task
Or inspiration?
I say perspiration.
(not exactly, for there’s joy and fun
in reading what you’ve ultimately done)
Still yet,
It’s work and effort,
Spadework fundamental, elemental;
Work, but also preparation mental
                                   for what is to follow
All the golden yellow years to come.
First a phrase, a thought, a sight,
A theme the middle of the night.
The paper, pen, computer close;
The start of slogging elbow grease.

First draft, still filled by sweat
May probably be filled with sh_t.
It doesn’t matter, for
The after-write will be to edit.

Changes, flexibility, ability to cross things out,
Delete, expunge, all but destroy…
There is a certain joy in that.
But still, it’s to exert an effort.
To create is always effort.
To excite and rouse yourself an effort always
Work, but worth it.

Here’s the send-off:
In the end and after years
It’s actually easier.
The fears that held you back have disappeared.
Ideas developed, riper.
Technique, range your own:
It’s called a style.  You’ve a rone,*
A drainpipe in your brain
To carry off unwanted stuff
And carry on much wanted t-raining.

Many hours, many days in which to raise your standard.
Many years of joy and tears -
It all adds up up to guarantees and widened spheres
Of self-esteem and understanding.

*a gutter for carrying off rain from a roof:
Many Hours, Many Days 2.12.2020 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

We use ‘my’ without a thought.  My goodness! Oh my!  We use it affectionately, sympathetically; my dear boy; my poor baby!  Also belonging to or associated with the speaker: my name is Arlene; my friend.
And yet, and yet…my is possessive.

         Examining ‘My’

My, means belonging to…
Does anything belong to you?
I don’t  think so.
My face, body, cat or house.
Worse,
My child, my wife and coin possessed?
Preposterous and pointless.
Mine to own?
Fallacious and  illusion;
All’s a loan.
Each object, person, situation
Not the tiniest bit mine.

It is better that you say:
“I go, you go, he goes, she goes”.
Goodness knows, each object goes:
Nothing’s mine and nothing’s yours;
Each thing seen, touched, held; a guise..

The range of verbs you choose to use
Should be reviewed to understand reality.
Everyone and everything but temporary.

Try to take a day or two
Getting used to finding out what, how and who
Relates to you.
Rotation, alternation, staying in our lives a day
But never staying always.

Examining ‘My’ 6.20.2020 Circling Round Reality; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

Day Of The Nobel Prize
             (October 8, 2020)

My poetry: No Nobel Prize,
No metaphors, few images;
Just plain old pragmatism
Made of rhyme and meter,
Themes that speak to those that need them,
Underlying or spotlighting
What is, mostly under-stressed by common folk,
Or spoken in their honoring
A local past or now or
Beauty or complaint or pain, for
Poetry is road; a world
Which is or is not typically unfurled.
Rhythm’s pattern flow its own,
A beat repeated lyrical,
Graceful, elegant, worth hearing,
Moving to, for, from the soul,
Every poem worth Nobel.

Day Of The Nobel Prize 10.8.2020 Our Times, Our Culture II; The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

This funny little phrase occurred to me today, and so I wrote...

Whatever You Concentrate On (Is Where Your Mind Will Go)

I’ve decided to respond to those who sweetly ask how to write a poem.  I’m not the best.  There is no best.  Arrest your own particular talent and bring it to its crest.✍️

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?

The Striving After Truth

I always strive for truth in verse,
Seldom using or ab-using license
Granted to us poets:
Metered rhyme half of the time,
Essences of substance:
Those are  one key.
Non-superficiality, honesty,
Non-weirdness in the here-ness.,
Nearness to the self its pelf:
All these are in the processes.

Striving not that easy -
Not as simple as you think!
No squint or wink can help you think.
No pain, no strain and no technique
Can leak the truth from inside out
From brain to paper, plain A4,
There being some mystique
That tweaks the mind
So that without a whine, it finds
A thought not ever thought about,
A light turned on by some deep wonder,
Some ‘cool’ processes down under.

Does it pay?
I would say
It’s more like play than labor.
Hour by hour one may babble,
Scrape the barrel of ideals,
Using up scraps of ideas…

Processing it endlessly,
Grappling, struggling to apply
One’s theme insistently.
All to get the truth-in-me
Into a form called poetry.

The Striving After Truth 2.14.2021 Pure Nakedness II;  Arlene Nover Corwin

Thinking Clearly

Simply trying to think clearly -
Times and destiny against me;
Not alone, it is we all.
A world of digits and addiction,
New temptations,
It admittedly an effort,
Tiny hippocampus shrinking ever.

Worlds and words that curl around reality
Like smoke from chimney.
Chronicles of global sadness,
Headlined news chronically bad.
A world of digits and statistics of a world on fire,
World that cultivates desire.
Ergo,
Ego mine is trying, as a consequence,
To change the sequence.
No veneer or scornful sneer.
Pensive, clear, fully sincere -
Harder probably, than ever.

Thinking Clearly 6.18.2017/revised 2.25.2020; again 6.2.2020
Our Times, Our Culture II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Having written “Things I Cannot Do”  and gotten so many spontaneously positive comments “Things I Cannot Stop” popped into my head  as a natural follow-up a week or two later.

     (Some)Things I Cannot Stop

Skin satiny and pigment-free
Withut a a freckled speck,
Creased, dry, wrinkly -
Or becoming so,
So unbecomingly..

Diet good, wholesome food
Eaten in a happy mood,
And still, a flab where muscle should
And used to be.  Rude
Mother Nature in her stature
Augur of maturing age.

Other things I cannot stop:
Hubby’s snoring from the deep,
Broken sleep,
The stiffened vocal cord that hides
The youthful voice once both our pride;
The sleep, the snore, the youthful voice
Are things that cannot be denied.
And though one tries, cannot avoid.

One might translate it all as unalloyed damnation.
One adjusts - without a bit of condemnation.
It’s acceptance all the way;
Living for the day
With phases come what may,
And living with each day
As stages in our destiny.

(Some) Things I Cannot Stop 8.7.2020 A Sense Of The Ridiculous II; Circling Round Ageing; Birth, Death & In Between III; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

Today’s thought.  (Isn’t thought a strange phenomenon?  It chooses itself)

Forever Counting (Words to Ponder)

Carbohydrates, calories, vitamins  & minerals,
Week workdays, holidays,
Tax returned and money earned;
Last summer’s weather, winter too…
The list of what you count depends on you -
But count you do, counting on the life you lead
And what you need.
What is the meaning of it all?
The fact of calculating, tallying
Tied to each and every errand.

We say, “It/he/she doesn’t count!”
Translated: it’s of no importance,
Has no meaning or significance.
It’s like saying matter is not/does not matter.
So many layered words turn in upon themselves
To even up the oxymoron,
Or more, add up to paradox?

We count on, count upon,
Count someone in,
Count something out.
What the heck’s this all about?
I count on you to think this out.
Engrossing as it is.

Count Basie!

Forever Counting (Words to Ponder) 10.17.2020 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

You will excuse a small vanity, I hope.

Still Needing Reminders

This is actually a spontaneously inspired message of love and appreciation to new found Facebook friends from all over this varied globe.    

             Cryptic Time

Posts from all the world!
Who would have thought that flags unfurled
For little me from many you,
And many you from little me.
I’m filled and swell!

Time passes and with glasses raised up high
I sigh a gladdened sigh
That sitting here on chair in Sweden
More than one admiring eye
Is reading this, this very minute
Taking in the things I have to say
On chairs a million miles away.  

Quell mystery! For we  
Will all be history a hundred years from now,
Perhaps no documentary fragment left
To inventory our best efforts.
Yet, we’re here, to write and wrestle with
A universe, and universal questions all have faced
Since time began.  
And we, each other’s fan
Give love through likes and hearts and upraised thumbs.
Fumbling, tumbling round, zooming in on every crumb
That life can offer
Never coming to an ultimate.
Offering love to every Facebook friend
Not succumbing to the humdrum of an end
But encouraging each other.  
Is that not grand!

Cryptic Time 6.14.2019 Circling Round Time !!; Circling Round Reality; Birth, Death & In Between III; Arlene Nover Corwin

(Written to Joe Maita’s site JerryjazzMusician who, now and again calls out to jazz musicians everywhere for relevant poetry.  A great idea!  Especially for us jazz musician enthusiasts and non-musician enthusiasts without whom jazz might never exist.

It’s always such a pleasure to get your call to arms.  Wrote this just now just for you - and the rest of the world, natch.

    Sitting Down To Play

Inspired by a photo sent to me with a request that I write a poem.  And so I did!

“And here I was, thinking that the poems were too much of a burden for some! Thank you and bless you all! I write to be read. I write to share. I write from some magic, mysterious force and source”

This is always on my mind (almost).

      There Is A You Within The You

I have been drawn many years - by instinct or some gene - to the relationship of the chemical workings in our body to the working in the body/mind.  Never having consciously thought about this, I I noticed only this morning while watching a young lady who’d written a book about admiration and its effect on the body/mind that I’d been writing about that in poetical form for perhaps 40 years.  Below, one of the latest, (yesterday, in fact) is one.


      Talking To The Brain

I sometimes take the initiative
Taking, talking to the brain,
As if it were a representative
Of good and God, silent, present.

With no answers, no response,
I know each synapse is no dunce,
Transmitting neurons no morons
But batteried intelligence.
I’ve no solutions, but It has: Brain jazz!
And so I trust, with each new thought,
Each new idea, impulse or not
That something in the mono-ation’s conversation
Is productive, non-destructive.

With analysis, this mono-business
Is an enterprise filled with surprises;
Answers come each in their kind,
Blindly showing up in weeks, months, days
In ways I scarcely recognize:

Answers to a thought once prized,
I do not intellectualize
But go on with the one-on-one,
Knowing that it’s being processed
By some clever chemi-physic-sist
Up in-the-skies.

Talking To The Brain II 10.22.2020 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II;  Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

And When Do You Write?
             (a morning thought)

Assuming that we want to grow,
Each, every one of us with much to say
With wish to make some headway, be successful,
Thoughts, ideas original -
Inspiring for others;
Considering that we’re friends and brothers;

This considered, I’ll begin
By stating that I write in morning,
Topping off between, whenever
Circumstance or whim pops in unasked for.
Breakfast is the draw for me.
A time to munch and watch and see,
For TV’s in the room with me.
Blood sugar raised,
The brain takes in a pregnant phrase
Charged with stimulation,
Even modest revelation.

But you?  
When do you do when you do do?
Just a query,
Interested as I am in creation, creativity,
Body, mind relation; a concern instinctive -
Born of intuition, intellect and love.

And When Do You Write? 10.6.2020
The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

A Glass Half Empty…

A glass half empty
Is no matter what, half full.
Actually, factually.
Oxymoron at its best a tool
At worst a fool
Disguised as philosophical.

I know a lady from whose mouth
One’s never heard a hopeful truth;
No reassuring, optimistic path of possibility,
Perception geared to searing truths
That cannot soothe.
Poor thing!
One wonders: “Is she suffering?

One of life’s commodities,
Certainly its oddities;
Those unable to see light
When sun is out or bulb is lit.

There it stands:
A glass that stands for all to see.
Half full and simultaneously empty.

Check yourself and make your choice.
Each course you choose will bless
Or curse an outcome.
Don’t be numb to what goes on.
Don’t be green and don’t be dumb.
The empty half can always fill
With possibilities.

A Glass Half Empty…6.16.2020 Circling Round Reality; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover  Corwin

A Thought To The Writer

I’ve decided - no concluded
That there is no finished product -
That the motto is revision,
Which takes courage and reflection;

Perspective, understanding that
It’s destiny that leads,
Needs continually changing,
As are viewpoints -
Frame of reference
Ever you.

When you’re reading what you’ve written
(I say this from observation)
You’ve come back a different person.
You discover when reviewing,
What was smitten needs renewing:
Shakespeare tearing up the script,
To Romeo and Juliet
Because he thought the first was sh_t.
No double suicide;
No place where anyone has died.

Yes, there is no finished product;
Not in literature or life.
We inspect, reflect, reject
And we rewrite.

A ThoughtTo The Writer 6.29.2020 The Processes: Creative, Thinking Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Letter To Those Who Take Life ✍️ ☮️

Those who take life have no understanding of the prize:
The measure, treasure, pleasure of existence’ meaning.
Those who take life too grow older,
Too regret if they are wise,
Realising one day everybody dies,
Including they themselves.

Life’s triangle from the first indrawing breath -
Birth and death
                         and all between,                            
One meaning being to prolong
One’s own and creatures weak and strong;
To NOT take but care for each form,
Our fellow humans the first norm.

Life, birth, death and all in between -
What comes thereafter to be seen,
The how, when to be left for then;
Is ever speculation.

Now has beauty, and our duty
Is to see and cherish every blemish,
Not diminishing the self or others.

Love and caring, action sharing;
All you need to make life better
Is this creed and poem, a letter
Aimed at those who dare
                                        take life.
Letter To Those Who Take Life 6.23.2019 Birth, Death & In Between III; Arlene Nover Corwin✍️

A kind reader called me ‘wise’. Who knows if one is wise or not? One has insights now and again. Sometimes judicious and far-sighted. One is never sure. One simply looks around, reflects, selects, words based on one’s own propensities and character. One is happy if one’s ideas stir the *** of good feeling, constructive feelings – some things positive in any case, in another.

I woke this morning, watched my morning TV, ate breakfast, and outcame this: having been worked on 3-4- hours; refined, more clearly defined, even as I write for sending.

     A New Awakening

For me, each day’s become
A new awakening.
I don’t remember yesterday,
(that, almost literally).
Each day I feel a newly born
Who hasn’t had a day before;
For him or her,
Each day’s events, the weekly sequence that lacks reference:
Wholly fresh and unprocessed.
No programmed habits in the way,

The learned unnecessary.
Every breakfast, lunch and dinner
Informing and a finding
With the force of creativity
Touched by serotonin, dopamine
And filled with oxytocin, which means
Happiness, and with that -ness invention.

Ageing has its benefits.
The days untied, untried,
Duties less a press;
To the better in the dwindling senses, subtle changes;
Fun in what was obligation:
Cooking, laundry, scrubbing, dusting -
All the ordinary musts amusing,
Yesteryear’s mad fusses fusing!
An awakening!  
A new sense-action and a prize
Of unadulterated size!

A New Awakening 11.17.2020 Circling Round Ageing; Pure Nakedness II; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

Your Place On This Planet

I’ve asked and asked,
And never could come to the question -
Not the right one anyway.
What was it that I wanted to find out?
I think I know,
The answer come about:
What is my place, what am I meant to do
To know about myself, the space I take?
The answer’s slow in coming, So I wait.
It grows and growing, showing bit by bit
Small flashes of perception;
Pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, nuzzling in collaboration
Ultimately fitting, sitting with perfection.
I, you, all, can only wait:
Wait and act in wholesome ways.
As Buddha says,
“The middle way is always best.”
It is what makes you last the longest.
What you wished and what you wanted
Usually
Turns out to be
A thumping great illusion.
Follow instinct, intuition.  
Each will lead to what you’ve needed
All the while.
There’s a You inside of you. The Real you!
There’s  a Force outside of you
That leads and kneads this real you.
Follow both.
They lead to Truth - the truths for you:
The truths that are the real you,
The you that you can kneel to,
Feeling they are full of right and rightful.

Your Place On this Planet 1.25.2021 Pure Nakedness II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Welcoming 2019

Old

Old:  What then?
Nothing you envisioned.
When you still see nothing’s happened.
Brain and head, the genus strain of breed
Inside precisioned:
Supremely known to God alone.

Mirrored image says to one,
Stifled by all kinds of blarney,
“This is me!”
While scolding image old keeps screeching,
“This is really you, you creature!”

Stretching like the rainbow’s arch,
Gold out of reach, perennially out of touch,
More a cockroach than a torch.
The young cannot conceive of it.
You believe, for you perceive it.

Doctors twenty-eight, or so,
Policemen new, firemen too,
Lawyer and aristocrat…updated.
All are babies.
Old is known - and hardly that -
By those who daily flat out own it.
Even when you’ve got it, are it,
Even then, what is it?
Old will ever be a ‘What!’.
 
Old 10.5.2015/re-composed 1.31.2021 Circling Round Ageing; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

Make Jazz!

When I perform I don’t get nervous,
But regard the audience
As friends;
That even if I fall off the piano stool,
I can get up, or play the fool,
Start again, begin
And no one there will lose their patience;
That a fault, mistake,
With note that’s flat, forgotten lyric,
May well be misunderstood.
But hey, I’m good!
I’m talented, I sing, I swing,
And I’m a giver!
Just as dust will always gather
On a mirror,
So too,
I, we, you
Will go wrong sometime in our song.
Therefore, it’s wise
To learn to improvise
And make the day
A chance to play.
In other words, make jazz!

Make Jazz! 3.3.2021 Vaguely About Music II; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

Seldom examined.      

               LOVER AND BELOVED✍️

I was thinking about all the misinformation that we walk around with in our heads, taking it as truth.  

Writing everyday, as I do, I really do write down any thought that catches me.  It's all a kind of etude: a study, a learning process.  Themes differing, but always a Corwin thread underlying, it seems to me everything I compose has validity, both artistically and philosophically.  (see poem enclosed:)
             Words & Marriage
           Word Paralysis: Stunted Growth

Couples do it all the time:
Talk in phrases long cliched by platitude,
Of staled attitude.
They don’t communicate
(except perhaps when fornicating).
Don’t learn,
The phrases all the same,
Repeated at each meal, each film.

They’re missing out
On IQ raising inspiration,
Real communication
Worn or lost in years or habit:
Customary words inadequate.

They learn to neither listen
Nor to pay attention,
Stopping up their listening ears
Through years of word paralysis.

Sometimes deafness very real
Strikes one to the other mate.
There goes the skill of conversation,
Life’s love communication.

What to do?
What the solution?
Partnership and marriage
As a dance for two
Goes falling through.
Through simple lack of word renewal.

Who wants boredom,
Wants to snore when loved one speaks?
Love goes sneaking out the door
When words no longer stir or spur.

Words&Marriage 6.20.2020 Love Relationships II; Arlene Nover Corwin

The Particles Of God