You've all heard of "A Space Odyssey".   This could be called "A Space Hypothesis".

I'm becoming quite, quite addicted to sharing with all of you out there.  It's elating!  I thank you all for being there.
              Another Realization

“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”

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

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

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

This is always on my mind (almost).

      There Is A You Within The You

Welcoming 2019

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

I’ve been thinking about the phenomenon of marketing for a long time now, and how, to be successful in the modern sense, using the words to mean ‘life of ease, comfort, the good life, wealth, riches, fortune opulence. luxury triumph, bestseller-ism, box-office, sell-out, celebrity, stardom, super-stardom, big name, household name, VIP, leading light, and such,  I see the up sides and I see the down sides: the demands, the touring,  all the followup pressures and the exploitation   The transience of it all.  
What to do?  How to view it?

           Marketing

Two Things Operating

The Particles Of God

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.

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

We Are Strange Mixtures

Human beings are notorious -
Thinking up excuses
In defense of faulty judgment
Or of ‘right out’ low intent.

One knows people, modest, kind,
Who fall down on their sword
When it concerns the lie.
Defensive in the most unworthy sense
Which to the hearer makes no sense,
Is nonsense clear, reasoning vague, logic  dense.

We are a race of contradictions,
Our convictions often faulty.
It is bravery
To always try to tell the truth,
Admit one or the hundredth myth.
What, why this fear of truth?

The ego, which we need to live -
A dual tool for our survival.
Slap bang that! - a dual fuel.
One part tells that us we are we,
The other gives us vanity.

To allay and keep at bay the negative,
Become the person meant to be:
Open, humble, self assured, free of funk-anxiety,
Unified and undefiled
Is the gift we will receive.

We Are Strange Mixtures 6.12.2020 Circling Round Experience; Definitely Didactic II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Seldom examined.      

               LOVER AND BELOVED✍️

I loved writing this.  It took 3 minutes (figuratively)
                
Three Hundred Sixty Joints, Six Hundred Muscles

Feel inspired:
You have muscles, joints.
Anointed by the highest forces.
You can run and walk,
Go for a jaunt,
Lift, push and pull…
Can sit completely still,
Your joints and muscles circulating,
Socializing in the company
Of body.

There is a trick.
If you are well – or sick
Locate the tiniest of movements, and
Take tiny steps within those moments:
Move!  Test! Prove!
There is a guarantee: You will improve!
Every tiny movement prompted by
Your inner wish; roused and stimulated,
Motivated and impelled
To do your will.

Each joint a function and an unction.
Muscle/joint a juncture to another.
What a wonder!
Wonderful and wondrous
All these crossroads;
Never overloaded.
Seldom tired.
Feel inspired!

360 Joints, 600 Muscles 6.9.2020 Nature Of & In Reality; Circling Round Nature; Arlene Nover Corwin

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

      I Get These Offers✍️

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

Never Out Of Season

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

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

My beloved Kent is 83 today. Here's what I wrote to him:

     Saying Goodbye To Eighty-Two
We're lying here. It’s nine p.m.  Nine p.m. exactly!
Three more hours to eighty-three.
Do you feel different?
Much less ignorant than yesterday?
Feel that years have run away?
Or maybe you don’t mind
The wrinkles that you find?
Don’t care that hair is thinner
Or that whether it is there
Or not.
Three more hours.
In the morning I’ll give you a poem I’ve framed.
I’ll let you come and give me breakfast.
Everything will be the same
Except that you are one year older.
Once again, we are
Three years, three months apart.
Dear heart,
A happy wish for years to give
You health and vigour.
Years to live twenty years longer -
Maybe twenty-four years more.
Say goodbye to eighty-two
And I will say, “Sweet dreams” to you.
You’re tired and I’m inspired
So I’ll wait until tomorrow
Till you read this.
Here’s a goodnight kiss:
(****, ****)

*
"****, ****" means kisses in Swedish
  Happy, Happy Eighty-Third
Are you really eighty-three today?
In weighing time, the climb of time
It seems a fancy fantasy.  
As if not many moments past have passed,
And last year I was forty-eight or so,
You forty-four or five, the glow
Of youth still in our faces,
Space of time not closed.
Who knows how long the years are likely?
Time’s been good to you and me:
incredibly, we live like royalty
And lovingly, to boot.
We’ve rooted out the key to what
A  good relationship should be.
You’ve made me happy,
And so, in return, I wish you too,
This final word:
A HAPPY, HAPPY EIGHTY-THIRD!
Happy,Happy Eighty-Third 2.8.2021BirthdayBook; LoveRelationships; ArleneNover Corwi

Sometimes I Wake Up Thinking…

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

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

Just when I was thinking that I'd run into a wall of writer's cramp...✍️

World Famous & Legendary 2,  Or, It’s All About Illusions

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.✍️

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

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

A Poet¨s Diary  ✏️⌨️

We’ll Call It Meditation

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.

        You Can Be Sure

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

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

This is a poem that’s meant to stop worry.
Arlene
    Nobody Cares But You
(a poem about detachment)

It was a gig.*
Fancy hotel, piano/song.
Song was “Yesterday” by Kern -
A song I’d learned; five decades worn.
What could go wrong?
I knew the song from back to front,
Each bar, each note Jerome Kern wrote.
And then it happened in the bridge:
Mind went blank! Memory rigid!
No matter how I searched and banged
I could not find the changes (chords),
Which key or what.  Carrying on,
Not caring what the crowd
Was thinking, I remained the fool
On a piano stool until, at last,
The bumbling, stumbling passed
And I was back on track.

Key found, my vocal sound as good as ever,
I’d discovered never be stopped by obstacle or handicap;
Never let it sap nerve, verve or energies,
For I’m not there to serve or please;
I’m there to carry through a form of choice,
Give my jazz to some Corwin voice,
Let the moment be my norm
Never wishing for perfection
Or to make a good impression,
The interpretation mine, just mine,
Anything I manage fine, just fine.

There’s no such thing as flawlessness.
The folk out there more focussed
On its own concerns and interests,
Concentrative powers, capability and prowess
Lasting no more than a minute,
Public recall all but ‘perfect’.

Do your thing
Not just for God and king
But for the joy of self and self-fulfilling.
Dare, share, always there.
No one really cares but you.

Nobody Cares But You 12.26.2019
Pure Nakedness; The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative; Vaguely About Music; Arlene Nover Corwin
*gig; musician’s jargon for job or engagement.
bridge; the middle of a song, often called release.

Approaching Eighty-Four

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

It’s Always A Long Road

It has been said,
It is a long, long road ahead
To where you want the road to lead,
The bed you lie in’s one you’ve made.

Not glad to be pedestrian,
Let’s hope that what you want is of significance,
The highest of your competence.

How easily we’re pleased with less;
The choice that leads from bad to worse.
Tychism’s doctrine* has its flaws;
Life not just chance and not just chaos.
Things have causes and effects
Projecting further cause/effects.

With little place for accidental luck
Or good/bad providential fluke.
It’s what you do with what’s been given
That’s the recipe for living.

In the visibly explicable,
Choice is faintly recognizable.
The road will never fail to be a trail
That defies portrayal.

It’s Always A Long Road 2.5.2020 Circling Round Experience; Definitely Didactic II; Arlene Nover Corwin

*Tychism: the doctrine that account must be taken of the element of chance in reasoning or explanation of the universe

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

Rosh Hashanah
(Jewish New Year celebrating 5781)

To honor Jewish New Year
I put this here:

Year, fifty seven eighty-one.
Five thousand seven hundred
Eighty-one: a time for self-renewal,
Self-reflection.

Self renewal:
Jewel
In a holiday
Which only stays
Two happy days.

A Yiddish standard wish could read;
“Have a good and blessed year!”
In Hebrew one could plead,
“Shanah Tovah!”:  “Sweet’ and happy year!”
No fear but sweet good wishes from the heart
For this year’s date
Sealed by good fate.

And so, in blowing the shofar
I pose the question:
Who could ask for more,
For duties simply put,
Lie there.

shofar; a ram’s horn used in the Jewish High holidays to awaken the soul.

Rosh Hashanah 9.18.2020 Our Times, Our Culture II; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

Just looking through some old stuff and found this lovely one inspired when sitting in the living room with an extaordinarily bright full moon coming straight through my window.

      Mister Moon Looking Through The Window

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

Born Without The Empathy Gene

Massaging Each Other

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✍️

Sublime But Subtle

Truths that seem most obvious,
Like being kind and generous
Are more demanding than you’d think: androgynous
As any double sided thing can be.
The most divine suggestions
Simplest in theory, hardest to employ.
Virtues and their energy:
Goodness as integrity, nobility and purity -
So easy to define, the list goes on
With honesty of spirit the essential function.

‘Sublimity’ means such a high degree of excellence
It cannot be surpassed,
The question being, how does one
Get the sublime once reached, to last?
Or how does one identify sublimity at all?
How not be a puppet at another being’s call?
Lies and infidelity, intrigue, hanky-panky:
Also easy to define and place
But signs as veiled and as delicate as lace.

Life’s facets, their intentions subtle, fragile, clever:
Truths which often sidestep mind of doer and observer.
The question of existence
Boils down to more than happiness -
Its happenings confused in ways,
With no advice but laws whose source
Is cause/effect, pauses that pass on
To more and more of same.
“so subtle are the signs”,
“so subtle are the signs” - Corwin:To The Child Mystic 2010  Arlene Corwin

Sublime But Subtle 2.28.2021 Circling Round Reality; Arlene Nover Corwin

Photo discovered on Facebook's 'memories'.   Wow!