Sometimes I Wake Up Thinking…

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

Born Without The Empathy Gene

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

This morning’s musing. Sent to special friends, as usual.

           Trying To Manipulate Vanity.

A Poet¨s Diary  ✏️⌨️

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

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

DEAR GOD: A LETTER & A STATEMENT

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

She Was A Hippy

She never smoked, never drank,
Never joined a cult or sect.
Her hippiness, her happiness
Found itself in waist length hair,
Patterned tights,
Bra dismissed
And short, short skirts:
Her expression of new freedom.

Fifties beatniks never reached her,
But the sixties found a new awareness
Which addressed her heart,
Unleashed a part she only guessed at;
One which dressed her mind.
Convention could not bind her
As behavior took a shape unstudied,
Natural - hardly touched before.

Maturity without hashish, Rajneesh,
The itch of spirit bringing in a shift in old priorities.
A little bolder, somewhat older;
Hippy of a different sort.
Mother, wife, musician, poet
All and each each supportive
And escorting her some steps to standing,
Understanding and continuance.

She Was A Hippy 3.13.2020 Pure Nakedness II;  Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

If I Had An Editor

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.

Everything (Is) A Point In Space 2020

Everything is a point in space,
Related to a point in space;
Nothing far,
Nothing near,
All things relative to here
Or there or then.
Not just to here or when,
Or yes, how long.

Tonality’s keynote song
Has contrast-worth,
All on earth non-absolute.

Enter point, enter center,
No obstructing intercepter
But a  center and a center of said centers,
(even centers have a center
As a point in space
Un-erased by laws of time).

At the root, I have surmised,
There is no friction and no bias.
Or is it a pious fiction,
Science fiction’s pie-in-sky?

Everything A Point In Space 9.7.2002/ re-composed 4.4.2020
Nature In & Of Reality; To The Child Mystic; Circling Round Science;
Arlene Corwin

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;

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

Two Things Operating

I was thinking about all the misinformation that we walk around with in our heads, taking it as truth.  ideas are in your head.  
     I’m sure I wrote this phrase somewhere before, but I’ve no idea where, in what form or what and how I said it.  So I’ll start again.

        Ideas Are In Your Head

Ideas are in your head.
Where else?
You think your thoughts,
Which thoughts are ultimately forced,
The force produced by you alone:
Your tendencies, your latencies
Your genes, your DNA - in short,
Your very own creations,
The perception never what you think.

Objectivity? No matter how we try,
Improbable, implausible  because of “I”.
No matter what the truth,
No matter what the source:
Encyclopaedic, Wikiped…
Accepted to the -enth degree;
It does’t matter.
You, interpreter of all that courses
Concentratedly or scattered.

What is idea, after all?
Purpose; porous* understanding;
Wish, belief, a supposition;
Mental picture, theory,  
Feeling, fancy…

Any drive that drives you
Forms within your head.
Recognise this fact instead of
Taking what you think as sacred.
You’ll become more undiminished, interested
And open-minded.  Guaranteed!

Ideas Are In Your Head 5.4.2020 The Processes: Creative;Thinking; Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin
*porous; poetic licence

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.

You’re welcome to share this usually ignored truth with the world.  And for those spiritually oriented people who think I’ve left out ‘soul - even soul has to take a body before it can function. Otherwise, it’s just up there somewhere in the skies.

Arlene

             Body  

Everybody is a body:
Underneath it all, a body total.
Big or small, broad and ample,
Slight, but never trivial,
Arrival on this planet
Nothing short of miracle;

We’re meant to love it, but without
The pride of vanity,
For we know, vanities
Are valueless,
The body, paradoxically,
A  transiency;  
One could just say,
A moment’s instability.

We’re born to care
And not be fooled by armpit hair,
**** and cheek.
Soon or late all parts are weakened.

Tooled to grow, unroll, unfold:
It is a body, after all.
A million, zillion cells
That only ever wish us well.
Dimply, pimply, faintly smelly.
When each jolly quirk is tallied,
Everybody but a body.

Torsos weak and torsos strong
See us through the whole lifelong;
All of you and all of me.
This solely one and only body.

Body 7.22.2020 Circling Round Nature II; Nature Of & In Reality; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

Never Out Of Season

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…

Everyone Is Asking For Money

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

Massaging Each Other

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

Memories Out Of The Blue

Ageing is a funny thing:
You don’t remember what you ate
For breakfast; day or date;
A dozen little things of late…
But classmates from when you were eight,
The teacher’s name and where you sat
As fresh I-don’t-know.
Time used to go so slowly
In the summer holidays.
You, left to roam the streets alone;
The ice cream man, his ice cream van
Jingling melodiously;
Playing ‘potsy’ on the sidewalk,
Marking out the form with chalk;
Trolley cars still rumbling by
Soon to flee, be
Changed for buses, electricity.
There still was coal, an icebox.
I was six.
Wagons rolled, pulled by a horse.
Who would think the time could blink
And nineteen forty-one would sink
Into oblivion: friends gone,
The matinee on Saturday,
Chinese three course lunch a dollar,
Mommy hollering to come inside;
Brooklyn memories that hide till now,
When from the blue, unasked,
Incongruous, an echo and a powder
Banks of memory pour out unmasked.

Memories Out Of The Blue 1.17.2021 Circling Round Experience; Circling Round Ageing; Arlene Nover Corwin

When a poem comes out from head and hand in twenty minutes, one is suspicious, almost sure it will be returned to for revision and correction - often re-creation.      
So far, thirty minutes and adjustments later this head-to-hand is still content.
        
        The Right Attitude

Sinatra had ‘the world on a string’.
Some have the world on their shoulders,
Walking ‘round a wounded Atlas.
What attitude
Can turn an Atlas tuned to self essential?
One which takes the stance
That though life’s no dance,
We cannot “change the thing we can’t control”
But view it holy in its whole,
Defined, refined by character and rectitude
Which spreads its finite wavelengths
Without damage to the soul of strength.

The Right Attitude 10.25.2020 Circling Round Reality; Arlene Nover Corwin

I’ve Got The World On A String Lyrics;Ted Koehler Music; Harold Arlen
*Serenity Prayer; Reinhold Niebhr (often used by Alcoholics Anonymous)

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

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

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

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…

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

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

The Whole Trinity

We are a brain that has a body,
And a soul that has a brain:
A trinity, foreordained; pre-destined
With design and specificity, tendency
Both dark and light.
What a mixtur-ed mystery!

The most of fixtures:
Cells like batteries,
Organs, hormones, anti-bodies,
Arteries and veins through which red liquid runs
To carry precious oxygen to all the tissues in the body.

What a list to get the gist of!
So encyclopaedic, google doesn’t stand a chance.

Even synapses connecting all the billion bits of detail:
Nerve cells with a tiny gap where particles can mingle.

We are a brain that has a body,
And a soul that has and is the whole,
Examining which you’’ll
Comprehend.

The Whole Trinity 10.18.2020 Nature Of & In Reality; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

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.

Words To Loathe:  -Ism, Dogma

Time and again I wrote of -ism.
(Criticism, witticism doesn’t count)
Coming at the ends of words
-Ism turns to hardened turds,
To be followed by the herds
Who seldom understand a thing
In its entirety.

-Ism makes a word into its specialty.
Takes a system or philosophy
And breaks it down to dogma’s ideology.
There’s always something wrong with dogma.

Dogma says “i’m right, you’re wrong.”
A hackneyed song.
Dogma takes opinion,
Makes it fact, actively
Turning people into minions,
Underlings and servile
To the prominent, the dominant and vile,
Screaming all the while,
Each gosh darned night
“You’re wrong, we’re right!”

Guidance to the prudent:
Don’t become a rodent.
You are you with views original,
Authentic, actual, primordial.
Conventional or not, they are,
And you, an individual -
Undivided and your own.
There is no need to ban or loan,
Prohibit others or exclude.
It’s downright rude, crude,
Not to say, misleading and deluding.

Words to shy away from, fly from:
Words omitting possibility,
Emitting sheer hostility, dishonour and discredit…
Words that say,”We’ve got the secret.”
All those words that separate
The small from great.
Who is to say what’s small, what’s great?
That’s it, the last and little bit!🙋‍♀️

Words To Loathe: -Ism, Dogma 5.21.2020 Words To Love; Arlene Nover Corwin

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

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

Hello!  

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

Mourning Song To A Face

We’ll Call It Meditation

Working it through.

      Ought One Bathe In Sorrow?

What Takes Time
(when fingers have been amputated)

Buttoning and chopping onions.
(you don’t button onions, natch!)
Throwing ***** and playing catch;
Diverse actions needing oneness:
Three note chord, arpeggio
(If, of course you’ve played piano)
Wiping *** with just a thumb,
Zipping up,
Applying make-up.
Writing with a pen or pencil,
Lifting any large utensil;
Twists of wrists, techniques and muscles
While you’re rustling something up -
Things take time. You learn to cope,
And so,
You learn to take things slowly,
Much more slowly than you used to
When you ab- and mis-used time
By buzzing, cruising ‘round
Quite inexcusably.

Now focussed and enthused,
A strange new way infused,
The will to live renewed,
Things viewed as ordinary now extraordinary.
What takes time with digit gone
May have more than one compensation.
We shall see in years to come.

What Takes Time 11.24..2020 Birth, Death & In Between III; Pure Nakedness II; Arlene Nover Corwin

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

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

         I DIDN’T DARE

Home University

THE DEFINITIVE BOOK

There's always more to think about and say.

A ZILLION WAYS TO HEAL YOURSELF✍️

Keeping Up

You’ve heard the phrase
“to keep up with the Jones”,
But have you not yet heard of
‘Keeping up with new smart phones’?

Every time I see an ad
There seems to be another fad,
Another model, new technique.
You take a peek.
There’s more finesse, more flourishes,
The whole thing polished…gosh, oh gosh!

Technology, the things I see
Are running way ahead of me
Completely and confusingly.
One’s hazy in the fog of it,
Queasy at the sight of it,
The height of keeping up’’ a drain
On the most brainy of consumers -
For there’s coin involved,
Revolved around.  Who knows?
Consumers - that is us,
Gobbling up and keeping up.

Technology is self-propelling.
Experts telling, sales folk selling.
Where the dickens is this heading?
How far up can ‘up’ go up?
Electronics smaller, stronger,
Slimmed until the skin
Contains the smart phone fitted in,
One more component in the whole.
Will computers gain a soul?

Just a pup
Who can’t keep up.
That’s me.  

Keep up: keep pace, keep abreast, be aware (of developments).

Keeping Up 8.13.2020 Our Times, Our Culture II; A Sense Of The Ridiculous ll; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin