Amita Sarjit Ahluwalia writes

THUNDERSTORM PREDICTED

I like thunderstorms
I am like thunder itself these days
Or like a thundercloud
Shot through with electric impulses
Split by rod lightning
Dark yet luminous
Dissolving
Into tears of rain
For no other reason
Than the impulse
Of the season
I do not stop to ask
The why’s  and wherefore’s
Of my actions
Or my being
I am what I am
I do what I do
Like a thunderstorm
I gather, I burst
I dissolve
And then
I am
No more.

O yes!
You can see me
But
You cannot be me

I am either I
Or I am a Thunderstorm

I prefer
Thunderstorm

Arlene Corwin writes

Bliss

What does bliss consist of,

Or, to put it properly,

Of what does bliss consist?

One has been told

The properties of godliness

Are power, peace and purity,

Knowledge, love and bliss.

An easily dismissed and hard-defined

Form of continued happiness.

One so refined

And sifted through a sieve so fine,

There’s no impurity of sadness left,

The deftest hand designing it.

We human beings never quit

In walking roads, bearing loads,

Experimenting with all sorts of modes

To get to, feel it.

A unit with no parts,

Mind, heart dissolved and blended

In a homogeneous and splendid fire,

Sparkling in it’s colourless, see-through attire.

He or she in whom it’s sired

Has aspired eons.

Then, as if by accident

It’s sent! 

A burst, a still, a calm,

Perhaps the ultimate of balm.

Who knows of what this bliss consists?

Does he or she go on existing?

Or is this state out of which 

One never is the same?

Is it the final aim?

God knows.

Waking at 7am, my mind went to peace, power, purity, knowledge love and bliss - qualities I’ve been told make up the origin of origins, its machinery, innards and insides. Having thought deeply about the first five qualities, writing about them in sundry ways, finding numerous images to use, I have never been able to understand and certainly write about the last. Somehow, I was and am inspired to give it a go.

Arlene Corwin writes

Each Trick On Mac

I wish I knew each trick on Mac

To send and track;

Each new technique

A winning streak in cyber-speak. 

Trying hard to not be piqued

By an ineptitude 

That lies within the DNA

(or am I justifying being lazy).

Anyway, I’m way behind in keeping up.

In sending through my things to do,

Like all the books I’ve left to publish,

Then when published, to divulge.  

Indulge me:

Am I doomed to be unknown/ anon 

Until the kids of kids of kids have grown? 

Was it some centuries before Johan Sebastian Bach prevailed?

What’s-his long-forgotten name unveiled? 

Lost for ages Raphael (or some same fellow)…

You know what I mean.

And all because I never worked 

To learn this darned Machine!

* You’ll never believe it, but this sieve of a brain who tried for hours to recall ‘what’s-his-name’, abandoning it entirely, suddenly came up with, first, “Centuries of Meditations” then minutes later Traherne, then minutes more Thomas. My God, this has never happened before! That some figure I’d not referred to, given a thought to or even read since university days, should 65 years later suddenly explode with it. I’m in shock!  I have some re-writing to do, for sure. If not here, elsewhere. But first I ought to do a  little reading.

Arlene Corwin writes

 A Reader Commented

 “it can get repetitious

When you write about the brain.

The same refrain again, again.”

I answered: 

“Variations on a theme, that’s all it is.

Not repetitious, but delicious."

With so many things that need attention.

Variations in an endless fund,

The emphasis on fun and essence…

But just now I am in body mode,

Brain unfolding

Undercurrents sensed and flowing

In a stream of consciousness

That feel almost blessed

Because I don’t know where they're coming from, 

Not really.

What I do know is, there is a train:

Ideas starting in the brain

And through the hand,

Their end a piece of paper,

As if life was cutting some sweet caper,

In the art of understanding.

Arlene Corwin writes

Circling Round Experience 

                

What a charming happenstance!

Happy chance!

Twenty eighteen, book eighteen.

Twenty twenty, book still sketchy

But there’s poetry a-plenty…

Wondrous!. In the several hundreds!

Now to get this out,

To clout the living world with it.

I’ve been crowing like a maniac, a lunatic;

Known in better circles as enthusiastic:

Crazy about poetry - a devotee

Or let us say, creating it.

The whole year long, as good as daily:

Unpretentious, chatty, gayly, 

Full of idiom and slang,

Language common, language spoken,

Token jargon,

Arlene Corwin’s origin.

 

Yet like Dante Alighieri,

Layered: yin and yang,

Detached, intense and prescient

Simple, perspicacious, riotous 

Funny and absurd;

At times, confessionally worried.

All year long, I’ve pierced balloons 

In order to expel delusions,

Illusions duping us.

Thus,

Book eighteen 

Circles around everything;

Experience that’s One at bottom.

John Zedolik writes

Relative Convenience 



We have not been reduced
to harvesting spent lemon disks


and fatty skins of cooked
and consumed trout, 


so let us be happy in our level
of consumption and not worry 


about the occasional lack
of perfect choice in our sustenance.


Any fish or fruit will do
in this particular pinch 


any rind or remains signals crisis
—for now let’s just call our life a cinch.

John Zedolik writes

Private Service 



Anyone could be back here
on the dubious trail beside
the tracks and under the blind 


grip of clasping branches
that yield a private cathedral
of considerable length to any


worshipping in these bottom
lands in their own schismatic
way, river and rail gods girding 


the trace, but, one hopes, not
answering shady prayers for plunder,
pain to travelers, or blood, a stray-lamb 


sacrifice to private demons sans merci
in this tenebrous track leading
to scarred concrete and links 


barring entrance to the mill’s hulking
bones where hellish fires once
threatened without respite even 


the hardened worker, now dead,
or safer than the one on the mud-ruts
and crab grass during a Sunday morning 


under discarded leaves and shadows,
accompanied by only industry’s ghosts,
benign, unlike some current walkers, 


encased in calloused flesh, waiting with steel.