Arlene Corwin Poetry

A reflection of the creative process in action.
A Poet¨s Diary ✏️⌨️🗒💻

Four hours is about the time
It takes AC to write poem –
To spawn a concept holding true
Throughout, the format glued
So that the reader, unconfused
Can come away in thought, declaring,
“This I understood and ought to share it!”

Five this morning she awakened
And too tired to rise, she staked her
Bet on subtle yoga to do something wise
For body and for intellect,
Collecting and connecting mindful musings.

Suddenly, computer there on shelf beside her,
She could slide and write her unformed verse.
Still stilted, (could be worse),
But dripping through, the fingers tripping through
A blend of lexicon, thesaurus, thought and spontaneity.
Lo, a poem! Quite awful but with full veracity –
In need of much adjustment, which in turn erase
And suture lines to rhymes, mirror poetic face,
Which once again began to train and form a unit: charming
Meaning geared, the abstruse cleared, ejected and corrected, by which time
Not quite yet primed, Ms Corwin heard the first alarm;
A gentle wake-up sound which said,
“Four hours have passed. Get out of bed!”

She will go over poem once more.
With bedroom slippers still on floor, now on her feet,
She will go down the stairs to eat,
For writing is a hungry feat
Of mystical creation.
A Poet’s Diary 4.7.2019 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

The clock ticks like a wick downsizing in the dying:
Temporary, transient, here today and gone tomorrow.
Pastimes burrowed into passed times past,
One thinks of famous men and women, fired, admired.
Mind gets tired, for they’re gone,
Their traces ploughed into the fertile, furrowed place beyond.
Cassavetes* and Columbo*; cancer and dementia.
Legacies of wizardry and yet, their own and grievous ends.
Death leaves a black hole – pointless, endless,
Llfe a mole (in every sense): secret agent, blotch and spy.…
Gulf between ability and what is real:
The real causes in this wheel of cause/effect, effects so spread
It breaks one’s head to think about.
Life and end:
Serene or more than flesh can stand.
What’s left of name, what’s left of fame?
In a wink consigned to limbo.
What is left for one to do?
Desiring nothing, seeing through the great illusion:
Corwin’s view: nothingness of/ in the all.
So do not cry but live the by and by with joy;
Pain of any sort’s a sore-ful, wearying and taxing bore.
Know yourself, and carry on, not with tons of worried hurry, but with kindly moderation.
Suns and stars – the galaxies are growing out, then easing off.
Continue pleasing you yourself
With coffee, for all coffers are but coffins — truth you cannot slough.
Habits sound, so as to lengthen years with scarce few tears and fears;
Apostle of benevolence to one and all in the small, small spheres of sway;
Continuing in doings that belong to each propensity,
Refining all the while, smile!😀
Energy that’s vaporised, choices tapered day by day,
The clock tick-tocks your socks away.
(Quirky but not funny).
The Clock Tick Tocks Your Socks Away 4.7.2019 Definitely Didactic; Birth, Death & In Between III; Arlene Nover Corwin
*John Cassavetes; Peter Falk; two brilliantly creative and productive actor/writer/directors.

       The Clock Tick-Tocks Your Socks Away⏳
                  (quirky but not funny)

,

I Can’t Tell A Joke, But…😜

I can’t tell a joke
But when singing and playing in choked, smokey rooms,
I do have a sense of life’s humor.
A sense of the funny, the laughable, comical,
Silly and farcical,
Thoughtless, illusory, foolhardy,
Yes, even pointless ridiculousness.
Yet, I am not trying. I guess
I’m just pleasant, a nice Brooklyn peasant girl
Doing her best.

From whence
Comes this sense?
Well, I can’t say I know.
It shows when performing.
When babbling freely
Some sense of the silly comes storming in,
Wholly spontaneous – and people laugh!
It’s good for my craft
And I sing extra well, (I can tell).
I have extra fun.
I am Parker* and Corwin all rolled into one.

According to thinkers, philosophers, sages,
Life is appearance, and all through the ages
The seeker and pundit
Have seen the truths under it,
And that the truth’s often funny,
Believe it or not.

I can’t tell a joke
But my yolk is pure gold.

*Dorothy Parker poet, critic satirist 1893-1967
I Can’t Tell A Joke, But…4.2.2019 A Sense Of The Ridiculous II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Sometimes One Needs A Personal God🧘‍♀️

The atheist soldier or sailor who, drowning,
Calling for mama, God or plain help,
Have mind-sets identical:
Secular, temporal, wholly the same
As the pious and scriptural.

Chemistry is the mysterious base,
Influenced as it is, neither by race
Or intelligence,
Talent or grace.

Character, temperament, circumstance, background,
The mind/brain the same when conditions are right.
The fact is that Truths are the same, day or night.
Only the names are dissimilar.

Faith is a standpoint dependent on hope.
Not piety, dogma, nor doctrinal dope.
Everyone has it in some form or other –
Some more illusion than this that, the other:
Money or status, or -isms or power.

Faith is invisible, chemical, personal.
In some strange way, though irrational, functional.

No one knows why, how it works, but it does.
It pays to have something in which you have trust.
Something to go to when all’s a big bust.
Or just because you can see through life’s illusion,
Which may be the reason you seek something true:
A some thing or one thing to go to because
Life has hinted at laws.
A something or someone that just doesn’t fade.
Sometimes one needs to believe in one God.

Sometimes One Needs A Personal God 4.1.2019 To The Child Mystic II; The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Circling Round Reality; Arlene Nover Corwin

Once again, sitting in the bathtub cogitating. 🧘‍♀️⏳

    OH, GEORGE, YOU WERE SO RIGHT*

Oh George, you were so right:
“What a pity youth is wasted on the young”-
Their nights, their days a blight of
Vanities and phases strung
On strings assumed will never sunder.
Youth’s generation gets things wrong,
Believing life will never end,
The smooth, smooth skin will never bend
And all the birthday years a pleasure without measure.
George, you found out youth’s a fool
Ruled by their times, tools of fate and character;
Reckless, immature –
Which some discover late. Though clever,
Some few (find out) almost never.

Oh George, You Were So Right 3.28.2019 I Is Always You Is We; Arlene Nover Corwin
*George Bernard Shaw, of course.

I was watching a reportage about the strong possibility of a war between Iraq and Kurdistani Kirkuk. I don’t consider myself a political person, neither politically aware nor politically active. But sometimes, I’m moved on a deep level at the futility of and process leading up to war. This is one of those moments. I went directly to the computer.
March 27, 2019 Just ‘found’ this -‘found’ in the broadest sense since it’s been on Facebook all this time. It seemed weaker than it must have felt when I wrote it in 2017. I’ve tinkered and re-written – with hopes that it’s stronger.
You Can’t Have A War🌎😣😪💀💪🏦🔫⚔️⚖️
🛢️
You can’t have a war unless you have weapons;
You can’t have those weapons unless you have industries;
Can’t have an industry earning no money –
And money means profit, for who runs an industry
That doesn’t profit? Profit’s the carrot.

Weapons-to-profit:
The distance is multi- or many small instances
Building the one upon other, passed over
Or turned a blind eye to.

Oil or real estate, access to labor,
Coasts, mines and power,
Their use and abuse
And war is the certainty.

It’s thoroughly sad, this fighting for terra;
A sickening error
Pretending it’s doctrine or canon or righteousness.
Overruled: conscience.

You can’t have a war, you cannot restrain it,
Unless there’s this chain of re-action,
With everyone playing his part.
It’s breaking my heart.
Ain’t it yours?
You Can’t Have A War 10.14.2017 War Book II; Our Times, Our Culture II; Arlene Corwin