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

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?

(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

If I Had An Editor

Jennifer My Metaphor #2

Jennifer, my metaphor
For daughter love, fidelity from up above;
A model for all wombmanhood:
Clear thinking, understanding and compassionate
Well spoken and all that;
A caretaker of injured cat
And any four-legged creature
In or out the door.
And now her fifty-seventh year is here.
A HAPPY BIRTHDAY Jenny dear!
No person could be nicer
Than a Jennifer,
My metaphor for Good.

JenniferMy Metaphor 2.2.2021 Birthday Book; Arlene Corwin Corwin

THE DEFINITIVE BOOK

Sometimes one just has to 'take the **** out of...’ and laugh at oneself! Philosophically, of course!

Mourning Song To A Face

Mourning Patricia’s Mom

Patricia’s mom, gone.  Ninety-one.
How to write a requiem:
Remembrance in honor…and an honor
For this writer.

Reaching ninety-one, then gone.
I didn’t know her,
But know her daughter
And I wish to honor all I saw.

One learns a lot from observation.
More aware of what one’s got
When day comes and there’s not a dot
Of earthly earnings, birthday's energies run out.

In the meantime, one’s learned
Love’s devotion is the winner
Where there is no sinner
But an ocean of reward:
Award: a honeycomb of golden good.

So in meekness I pay homage to:
The daughter
And the mother
And all others who, with gestures of unfeigned support,
Find words of thoughtfulness  and comfort.

Dear Patricia,
Know that I impart,
The dearest feelings in my heart,
Certain that you’ll pass them on
With love and deep affection.
Without selfishness but blessedness,
A messenger to all surrounding.
Mourning mom with love abounding,
Mourning Patricias’s Mom 6.29.2020 Birth, Death & In Between III; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

Although I consider faith a sine qua non without which one can accomplish nothing, I have a decidedly unromantic view about its nature . Though faith has a vague can’t-put-your-finger-on  essence, one thing can be assumed.  It works through and with the synapses of the brain.

You Can’t Beat A Book✍️

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…

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

Older ******

Love life can smoulder still
When you get older, till
The gasp and sigh die out,
Expiring total.

Where tenderness lives
Carnal knowledge survives.
Where love and affection survive,
A good love life will thrive.

The union of two
That is moving and true
Has a life of its own,
Not on loan but a power of staying,
Of carrying on.
Tenderness leaves out the hinder of ending.

While there are pauses and fadings away,
Touchings and strokings are blessings
That not only grow and develop, but stay
Till the ecstasy in its finality must die away.

Older ****** 10.1.2020 Circling Round Eros II; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

Up all night pondering this deep question:
        Examining Modesty:
      (a modest examination)

DEAR GOD: A LETTER & A STATEMENT

Hello!  

My Unconventional Life (to be continued, surely)

The Love Of Money

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

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

         I DIDN’T DARE

Everyone Is Asking For Money

The Dim Red Light So Far Away

One often wonders what God looks like:
Not a question but a wond’ring
Valid as a thought can be.
For we, mere beings who have hope in something
Not described as thing or non-thing,
But as endless power beyond thinking,
‘Thing-ness so mysterious
Still have within the will to know -
Our senses tell us so.

We want to smell, to see, to hear
The far and near;
We have a visual imagination,
That serves purpose,
Comes from, is,
In fact, the search for truth

And so, from youth to age,
We read the sages, analyse,
Use our eyes - both inner, outer.
All to understand the real, the utter
Real behind the ‘real’.

Mystics, other types who kneel,
Contemplate and meditate -
Of those, some have “beheld’’ a light:
A dim red light
Far from the night
Or universe’s outer sight -
Clear, not near
To those who’ve seen and gleaned from it
Attributes that shine from it.

Idolator or doubter,
Those who call it theatre.
All in search of comforter
May find it someday in the dim red light
So far away from darkened night.

The Dim Red Light So Far Away 2.6.2021 Circling Round Reality; God Book II; To The Child Mystic II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Home University

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.

Hello everyone on this January 3rd! Lend an ear

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

It’s not yet tomorrow, the 8th November. But like a child I’m already celebrating it with anticipation.  I’ve no real emotion, rather a quiet gratitude and awareness of life itself.  My eyes see nature differently, I hear and put together sounds in a newly discovered way.  The whole picture of what and who makes up life has taken on a new significance and hue.

   Happy Birthday To Myself

Happy Birthday To Myself!
My outer self, my inner Self!
The body me, the mind-full me.
The trillion cells
That keep me well.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO IT ALL!

Happy Birthday to the mood
That helps to make me feel good.
To fates that brought me where I am;
The virtues, gifts, the blames I claim.

Happy Birthday to the tricks
I’ve learned to use  at this
My new day’s eighty sixth;
Tricks and tips, clues, hints to share,
(One is ever part aware)

And so I send myself this mail
Literally as I am able.
Satisfied that I’ve not died.
With years that morphed
Into an age where I can sing this song:
Happy Birthday To Myself! 🎶
Toodle-loo and Cheers!  So long!  💕

Happy Birthday To Myself 11.8.2020 Birthday Book; 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

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

There's always more to think about and say.

A ZILLION WAYS TO HEAL YOURSELF✍️

Just Another Day…(Or Not?)

Hallelujah For The Older Woman

Hallelujah for the older woman,
She’s a prize for the world to see.
Hallelujah older women!
Age spots, wrinkles – deeply lovely!
Sure, there may be much to cure –
She has the cure.
Gone the ****** appetites,
Luring hormones God ignites,
Tiring drives the world invites.
The cosmos is her paramour.

No more of this world - just in it
And the world a thing - her plaything;
Something only age can bring,
Minute by each ageing minute.

Hallelujah For The Older Woman12.15.1999revised 3.4.2021 Circling RoundWomanII; Circling Round Ageing;Arlene Nover Corwin

It isn't often I write wholly optimist poetry, BUT today was one!
        Lucky Days

Everyone Must Do What They Were Born To Do

Everyone must do what they were born to do,
Obeying inner tendencies.
Laws of good and bad in mind,
The chore will always be
To go beneath the impulse
To beyond the false
To true —
Perhaps the new
Inside of you.

The doctor who
Was born to be a farmer,
Who through courses of
Bad choices
Chooses what he does not love
Will always feel dissatisfied
And not know why.

Vocation notwithstanding,
Rules of karma and pure luck,
Without the will to chuck the choice,
The small, small voice that tells you
Who and what you love to do — well, you
Had better listen.
The essential you lies there.

Everyone Must Do What They Were Born To Do 2.25.2021 Revelations Big & Small Arlene Nover Corwin

THE DEFINITIVE BOOK

Still Needing Reminders #2

An End To Everything

Driving in the car looking at the trees;
November colors, sparser leaves.
Their stunning, sunning profiles clear;
Tree trunks far or close together;
Defined the birch and pine, the heather,
The whole divine to me.
And yet one sees finality.
Winter sends a different sense.

Seasons brief;
Some bloom, some gloom, flame, flume -
All short.
But lying in my world of thought
I see the tree. the bird, the bee
As formed of start and end - and then,
A start again.

An End To Everything 11.14.2020 Circling Round Nature II; Arlene Nover Corwin

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

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…

Sometimes One Needs A Personal God

Confession To A Body

Body, you’ve been kind to me.
I’m not sure I’ve been kind back,
Complex the weaknesses which don’t perplex
Because of ignorance and vanity
And all those failings we abhor,
But still ignore.

When skin & bones, the organs, cells
Rebel because they don’t feel well…
Poor body!. While we are busy messing round,
You carry on by blessing all we do and more.
You’ve been a store of energy,
Instinct, tuition in each cell.
And now you do not feel too well:

Pains in the back, the sides, the middle.
Pains a riddle, piddling round, a joke that’s not a joke;
That pokes around in secret parts,
Yokes deficits to circulating heart
Which pumps its longing to survive
Because it knows the price, how nice to live,
The drive primeval.

Partnering with brain, it thinks,
“There’s so much left to do…”
And we, rewarded in abundance,
Know it’s true.

Confessions To A Body 10.7.2020 Pure Nakedness II; Circling Round Ageing; Circling Round Experience;

This is the kind of spontaneous nonsensical thought that shows up out of nowhere.
        
       Beauty’s Tide
      
I watch a certain TV lady;
See her daily.
She has reached the peak of beauty,
But
She doesn't know it.
Doesn’t know because
She doesn’t know its opposite -
Not yet.

Still there are signs to spot:
The thinning hairline;
Traces under eyes when she’s been working hard;
No sign of crepe-y neck.  Not yet.
No jowl-y chin, skin smooth and tight;
No ******* falling;
Waist still small.
One of a certain age can tell.

The menopause that takes no pause -
Facing just the right decade,
Beauty’s manifested light will fade,
But she, her gifts
Will probably not choose facelifts  
Or any kind of lift at all.
Her mind will shine - charisma too.
She will reach out to the ones who view
Until she decides - not to.

Beauty’s Tide 5.3.2020  Circling Round Experience; Circling Round The Ego; Circling Round Vanity II; Circling Round Woman; Arlene Nover Corwin

I was reading Jazz Wax (a great site written by Marc Myers: highly recommended) where he was telling me that two of the ‘famous’ clubs I worked in in New York were ‘long gone’. I thought ‘long gone’ was a perfect title and so set immediately to work.  This may not be the best of poetry.  It only took me 20 minutes or so.  But I like it anyway.

             LONG GONE

Questions, Insights In the Night

This election: eighty-six:
Next election: I’ll be ninety.
If I’m there, how will it be?
The issues, climes, economy?
Shot to hell each plant and tree?
Arctic icebergs flowing, dry?
Bird-less, fish-less, mammal-free?
Wormy things confirming that
The rings around the trees don’t grow,
No longer show, for as you know,
“The wages of sin is death” for all.

In four years will T have been faithful?
Told the truth, kept promises?
Done what he can?
Not been T promiscuous,
‘Grab the *****’ need all gone?
By ninety will there be a woman
Who will run and who can win?
Will Fun old Grump be loony binned?

Gun old Frump? Nano Cramp? Run old Chimp?
Will any win?
Be seen, be heard November third?

I hope I’ll be here for my duty:
‘Fake news’ outed for its hype,
Typing out my poetry,
Garden snails on my board;
Growing foodstuffs for the good;
Success and progress,
Conquered virus,
Plumbed black holes,
Nature whole;
Ego friendly, free of worry…

Four more years until next vote:
Will I laugh, will I gloat?
Find a way to play out life’s allotted,
Unsought, final day?
These, one giant question/insight
In the middle of last night.

Questions, Insights In The Night 10.12.2020 Circling Round Reality; A Sense Of The Ridiculous 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

This is the opposite side of the coin to “Everything We Do” (Facebook or Wordpress site)

        The Bad, The Harmful & The Worthless

The nail biting, smoking, drinking,
Mind cliches, the one that ******* -
All the zillion daily habits
Which, like rabid dogs are glitches
Which are setbacks which push back
The forward ****** of progress,
The kind of life meant for the best:
Life happiness!

Repetition may be key
To all achievement.
But like energy's great powers;
Sources that house forces
Dour, sour on the hour;
Positive & negative;
Latent, inherent, permanent
(Reference: atoms vis á vis the bomb.
Doesn't that just make you numb?)

Tips and hints: Pointing nose in the direction of,
You guessed it: truth and fact;
Learn to act with light and love,
Convert the covert negative
To merit, benefit and giving;
Good for all and plain overt.

The Bad, The Harmful & The Worthless;10.31.2020 Circling Round Reality; 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

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

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

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