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Ashley Chapman Aug 2018
(A peculiar dream this
where outside in
I cannot unlock the secret of my soul
but must in Love with a Stranger
turn myself inside out!)
This comes from the view of Lawrence Durrell, an English writer who, amongst many others, has argued that love is really a self-contained delusion. What you feel is never really what the 'other' feels, simply what you are feeling, personified. We poets love our feelings, live in their expression, but also know how entranced we are by their music. Durrell believed that ultimately we make all this music for its own sake, the sake of making music, not actually because another human being truly ever knows us, or shares in our ecstacy as they are entirely caught up in their own.
  Aug 2018 Ashley Chapman
Nat Lipstadt
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The Instigation:
Edmund  Black, commenting on “weary weighted,”

I agree with Kim; This is poetry at its best :)“

<•>

both of you shush!

there is no “better” in poetry

mine yours theirs, alive or not,

just gasps tears and blood
whimsical smiles and isles
cuts and burns of pained revelations,
hidden in fog,
that words try to delete away,
through the shrouded mists of
human tissues,
unconstrained by the
bounded shape
of the human cell,
our first, our own
self-imposed jail

tissue, too,
baby soft, or,
purple beating majestic bruised blotches
by those weaklings whose
kindness never
fully developed;  
or old man mine whose
skin cells erodes, so poems and light
weary weighted, lightly flake off
for your “betterment”
mostly tho for worse

good humans all await,
in patientce lightly hidden,
residents of dark sunspots
in the glaring existence exposer
of the unlit lighthouse whose time will come

they get it

how we get there unimportant

get there

GET THERE

get there
that is the poetic
mission critical

no path best or style preferred-
no compare just, but,
any path that
lifts and elevates,
to the commonplace


the common place

where all costarred, universal,
where common is the temple mount
of highest praise, holy smoke rising,

a place that
that discloses and closes,
is scribed/described honestly as
a connective,
which is the simplest
successive

call my poems,
blessedly common!

that an honorable,
so gladly accepted
and
so much more meaning-full
than merely best or better



for that,
I’d gladly weep,
for no praise
ever been
bettered





8/2/18 406pm
on the jitney to my isle
the instigation: Edmund black › “weary weighted, I agree with Kim .... This is poetry at its best :)“
  Aug 2018 Ashley Chapman
victoria
Arachnophobia

I want to live in nature
I want to travel the world
I want to live in a forest and hold hands with Mother Earth

But I have arachnophobia
My phobia is so strong that I’ve turned down jobs, trips to beautiful places even dinner parties at known spider houses!!
  Aug 2018 Ashley Chapman
Eric W
Take me into the depths.
Show me the underwater beast,
the Leviathan, the oceanic Medusa,
the wet, slithering, Hydra.
Let me breathe in the sick algae,
and bury my eyes in floating sand.
Fill my lungs with coral and stone,
and grind my feed to stumps
so I never escape.
Bind my hands with a seaweed embrace,
and let me bite the fisherman's hook,
fool such that I am.
Worthless drifting piece of trash
cast into the ocean tides,
starved of affection,
and bitter in the world.
Drag me down into the depths
and leave me there
where I belong.
Ashley Chapman Aug 2018
These days have ebbed
as Love's swell was checked:
the waters in some places
- all but dammed!

But now at last
I sense the rising tide
and thank Temese
for the current's turn;
now following that great writhing snake
to where its pulsing head will rake;
over the mucky soiled watery beds
of Woolwich
Greenwich
Limehouse
- and under -
Tower Bridge

     To that great gloating sight
                A crown of a billion lights
     Blazing day and night:
                And somewhere within
     In the slick oily warmth
                Our flood tides mesh,
     As over each other we wash.

Hard thrusts
wicked deep cuts
given and received
are recorded in that great mirror smoked!
where with a tug and a shove
on the banks
in the streets
through the loopy twists
everything prospers in the glow
as the decades decaying flow;
each ***** bud
red with new blood
one after t'other
flowers
before their purple petals scatter.

Let's on the luck o' the dice
(you 'n' me!)
ride out
on the flotsam and jetsom
that has carried us this far
and as pleases
merge.
London, a city with a rhythm, the Thames, which I sailed upon one Saturday morning - not a soul at this end of this magestic river, this city, in which I have lived for forty years...And love - a wonderful woman - and how I desire us to pull at each other as tides do, tugging at each other, two flows running over reeds and muddy shelves searching for each other in the cool green depth.
Ashley Chapman Aug 2018
Ça suffit!
Moi, je suis Sufi.
The meta-narrative that ignores...

It doesn't translate literally, but:

That's enough (In French enough is 'suffit').
Me, I'm a Sufi!
Ashley Chapman Aug 2018
B. S.
This is a poet's response to fakery: Brexit & Trumpism.
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