Arlene Corwin Poetry

Sometimes I write a poem and fully satisfied I print it, send it out to Facebook friends and then, a week later catch a glimpse and see weaknesses I’d never have thought of or recognised as being poetic deficiencies. This being the case, I offer you my just-now revised version of Euphoria #2 ✍️😇🧚‍♀️🧘‍♀️🤸‍♀️💕

We’re looking for euphoria!
For what, and also why and how?
Hence the drugs and alcohol,
Speedy pills et al, et al.

To keep on living in italic now
Focussed in the moment’s movement
Never knowing longterm outcome
But affecting points in time, each guided
In a way that shapes the next –
That the essence of this text!

How much sway
We really have on any day,
We cannot tell.
How much mastery is in our hands,
We cannot know or understand.
We want to win continuance,
A longterm dance, gratified, fulfilled and happy.
This we know instinctively.

Thus we come back to the word:
A summing up of qualities
Which make an ease
Of living’s satisfaction in the highest;
Cheer and delight, life play and sport;
Even rapture which transports.
In the world, not of…
Distorted by cavorting forces,
One can feel supported.

Hence phrases such as: ‘seventh heaven’ and ‘cloud nine’ –
Euphemisms for the finest of the fine –
Leaving out the toxic station of intoxication,
Euphoria’s exhilaration
Is the jubilation we were born to own.
Euphoria 6.28.2019 Nature Of & Reality; Arlene Nover Corwin

We’re looking for euphoria!
For what, and why and also how?
Hence the drugs and alcohol,
Speedy pills et al, et al.

To keep on living in the now
Focussed in the movement’s moment,
Never knowing longterm outcomes
But affecting points in time, each one guided
In a way that shapes the next –
That the essence of this text!

How much sway
We really have on any day
We cannot tell.
How much mastery is in our hands,
We cannot know or understand.
We want to win continuance,
A longterm dance, gratified, fulfilled and happy.
This we know instinctively.

Thus we come back to the word:
A summing up of qualities
Which make an ease of living
Satisfaction in the highest;
Gaiety, cheer and delight
And even rapture which transports.

Instead of being in the world
Distorted by cavorting forces,
One can feel supported.

Hence words such as: ‘seventh heaven’ and ‘cloud nine’ –
Euphemisms for the finest
of the fine.
Let us use euphoria’s intoxication
Leaving out the toxic station.
We are worth the jubilation
We were born to own.
Euphoria 6.22.2019 Nature Of & Reality; Arlene Nover Corwin

Asking For Monies 💲📢💲

One understands the world as Stress, big S
Inbuilt in latter-day societies;
Goods and wares, branded products on TV;
Non-existent guarantees.
Emails with their begging posts;
Which candidate do you like most?
Disappearing bees and trees;
Orphans, famine, deprivation; death from want.
Please donate monies,
Crises the world over;
Variations on a theme:
Crises we can never cover:
What to do?
It’s up to me. It’s up to you.
So,

When in doubt and cannot choose,
Leave the ads and leave the news.
Be of service to the one who shows up
On your doorstep.
In a way that fills the cup of momentary need.
Use your specialty as if it could
do miracles.
It’s all
A sequence for the good.
Everyone Is Asking for Monies 6.24.3019 Our Culture, Our Times II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Photo Of A Bridge In Sunset 🌉

In my mind (and in a photo)
I see a bridge in sunset.
What can it mean, this silhouette
Standing black and solitary ‘gainst a sky
That slowly darkens. Is it life that passes by
Each living, dying day?
So beautiful, so still. A blue above, a sea below.
You know
that it will stand that way
Each passing hour, because nothing stays –
The dark or light,
And though the night comes
It, the bridge, will bear all weights.
Strong and patient – and it waits,
A metaphor for anything you see in it.
Goings-on, permanence, crossings to
Another life reality more true
or not.
What an image!
Familiar, moving, stirring, strange!
One that might change life in seconds.

Inspired by a photo sent to me with a request that I write a poem. And so I did!🧘‍♀️✍️
Photo Of A Bridge In Sunset 6.26.2019 Circling Round Reality; Arlene Nover Corwin

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✍️

To take what happens in the moment,
Build on it: This is what I use in concert,
It, my jazz born, jazz spawned mantra.

There my genie, there my muse,
If I can fuse the three:
The moment, genie, muse and me;
(Oy, that’s four!)
How to mix and rhyme the four –
The moment, genie, muse and/or…
An omen or the lack thereof:
The moment, genie, muse and love:

I echo this long as I live,
Actively and creative,
Taking what is in the moment, bit by bit
Building on it.
This the key
To spontaneity
Demanded of the jazz-borne me.
The Concert Mantra 6.20.2019 Vaguely About MusicII; Arlene Nover Corwin 🎼🎹

I noticed how people argue, and how what should be a win-win situation often goes off the rails. I got me to thinking…🧘‍♀️🤔
When Logic Of The Argument Is Faulty
(Let Us Learn Good Thinking)

Even using intuition, it is good to be a thinker,
There is a something we call logic.
Truth-filled reasoning that’s never dated or archaic
Intermixed with common sense, is hard to find,
For mind is blind. It frolics superficially,
Ideas and bigotry, emotions in intensity, a bind.

When arguments are faulty,
Taking joy and cheer from dialogue,
Dialogue could, should be dialogic –
Conversation without passion,
Heart to heart negotiation,
Respect and love as consultation.

Logic in absentia
Turns friendship into acrimony,
Fellowship to enmity.

Sinking ships of thought abide
In politicians, egotists, ordinary jokey folk –
(One knows a few).
Not hiding from well reasoned talk
Which words could easily breath new life into
Is the simplest-cum-understandable solution.

It’s always hard to keep the thread
When heat ‘hots up’ a head
Besotted with itself in selfish reasoning.
Let us learn good thinking.
When Logic Of The Argument Is Faulty 6.18.2018/re-written 6.20.2019 I Is Always You Is We; The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

🤔

I’m not a nostalgic person. but occasionally I run across an old poem that feels worth putting out there for its universality and perhaps poetic value. Here is one such:⌚️🕰⏰⏳
Everything Is A Clock ⏳

I go to the postbox; I pick up the paper,
The day-date, the week-date, the year-date my keeper:
Measure, reminder, factual, sensory –
Every day’s newspaper clocking off time;
Printed and slanted as if it were gospel:
Ads, gimmicks, comics
Betraying a parody: flawed economics
Parading and claiming as true the impossible.
Then there’s the letter
All postmarked and fettered
To all-dying time,
Post-mortem minutes the record that ‘I’m.’

If you were to measure the growth of your nail,
You would see a clock, but you’d also see jail:
The need to prove where, what and that you exist,
Underlined, undermined
Measure by measure.

Everything Is A Clock 9.6.2002/revised1.16.2004/Circling Round Aging/Birth, Death & InBetween III; Circling Round Time II; Arlene Nover Corwin

⌛️

Once again a mini- wondering has pushed me to the keyboard (not the piano this time). Three hours have passed and here is the result:

Can meditations influence the world?
One daren’t respond
And waits for answers there unlearned;
Through insight, seen, the mystical – alone discerned.

A world? Much to insist upon?
There’s misery, the suffering, the evil, the corruption,
And we know that all that we can do is cure our selves.
Purify the flawed and imperfect-ed self
Whose weakness and shortcomings are hard to shelve.

Can little we, alone on cushion, chair or sofa
Offer up this blemished being
To a seeing eye up in the sky
We well nigh can’t be sure of?

Breathing tricks, mantric techniques,
Sound and focussing and other tweaks –
Can each ache jerk a world into a working peace?
Endeavours and experimenting reach long-term
Through reaching in and out the brain?

One hopes.
We see a world that barely copes –
Whose future looks bleak, weak, with tweeting leaders,
Cheeky citizens who leak the latest happenings.

Science tries. The churches try. Social-minded allies too.
But here is little you, sitting as I’m doing now,
Pondering over ‘if’ and ‘how’
Wondering if our meditations are a mediation
Of conciliatory worth
And if they reach the big round earth
With leverage from this average me.
We’ll speculate a bit – and try, and see!
Can One’s Meditations Influence…?6.16.2019 Our Times, Our Culture II; Arlene Nover Corwin

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.

Quelle 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