User Poetry

[Echase]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Calendar


My cat doesn’t care
it’s the last day
of the year

She just wants
her food
wants outside

Time is subjective
Mayans irrelevant
Sunshine and a nap


Kenny A. Chaffin – 12/31/12

I like your style.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Echase

I like your style.

Thanks!

[Dee Q]

Lost

Oh how I miss the good old days
When people were nice and tender-hearted
When I had trees to climbs and birds to raise
And green fields where I would rest on with my buddies, feeling contented

But now I feel lost and deeply wretched
Craving for love and companionship and warmth
For out there people themselves are struggling in their tiring orbit
Or perhaps with this disgrace I must come to terms

I would turn to angels then
‘Cause by hearsay they’re pure and benevolent
Yet where they are and how to find them are beyond my ken
I’m crushed, impoverished, and disheartened…

(English is not my mother tongue and I don't know the rules of English verse.)

[kennyc]

I like it!
I think you've captured the emotion!

[Dee Q]

Thank you, Kenny!

[RonPrice]

I'll post a piece I wrote yesterday before I leave this iste.-Ron
---------------------------
ABBA, ME, and WILLIAM JAMES

Part 1:

ABBA: Bang a Boomerang1 tells the inside story of Australia's colossal 70s crush on the Swedish supergroup ABBA and their music. It’s the story of how this unequalled and enduring fan-worship changed them, Australia, and Australians, forever. My wife and two step-daughters loved ABBA. From 1972 to 1982, when they were a phenomenon in Australia, I was busy: (i) with my teaching career working 60+ hours a week, (ii) with my work as a Baha’i in Whyalla, Gawler, Launceston, Melbourne, Ballarat, Smithton, Zeehan, and Katherine, (iii) going through a divorce, remarrying, and raising a family of 3 children, as well as (iv) dealing with episodes of bipolar 1 disorder.

ABC's innovative music program Countdown and its host Molly Meldrum were instrumental in bringing ABBA to a burgeoning mid-70s television audience. It was due to Countdown that Mamma Mia was released as a single, first in Australia and then the world. With this, the ABBA phenomenon was born.

Part 2:

This TV doco, ABBA: Bang a Boomerang, digs deep into the heartfelt memories of Australians with its cardboard cartons of memorabilia, its face-to-face encounters, its local pop-icon recounts, its lavish personal and public ABBA museums and Australia's rich media archives. It relives a moment of collective national 'craziness' when Australia literally went ABBA mad. The result of that experience is a warm, bright, captivating engagement with ABBA's time Downunder. The open-hearted embrace of all things ABBA would eventually, in part at least, define Australia.

One in three Australian households owned an ABBA record, from the then Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, to eight year olds around the nation. One of those 8 year-olds, Angela, lived in my home in 1978. That 8-year old girl now has a successful public relations career and is 42 years old. In 1979 my first and only son was born with ABBA somewhere out on the periphery. Australians, like Angela, were hooked even if some didn't want to admit it back then. It would appear, at least this is the view presented in this video, that the crush was for keeps.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC1 TV, 30/1/’13, 8:30-9:30 p.m.

When you are up to your eye-balls
in life’s trilogy of responsibilities:
job, community, and family, those
things in the electronic-media are at
best peripheral to the mainstream of
your life. After 80 to 90 hours in an
immersion in those life-demands all
you can do is try to get the sleep you
need to do it all again tomorrow, and
tomorrow. ABBA were, for me, like
a shooting star in some galaxy which
repeated itself off-and-on for 10 years
in my life while I was as busy as that
proverbial beaver just surviving and
making as much out of my life as I
possibly could with William James’s
booming-buzzing confusion of it all.1

1 William James(1842-1901), an American philosopher and psychologist who had trained as a physician, was the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. In his Principles of Psychology (1890) he refers to this booming and buzzing confusion in the following passage:

The baby is assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails all at once. It feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion, and to the very end of its life the location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extent or bigness of all the sensations, which came to its notice, at once coalesced together into one and the same space.

The above passage comes in the middle of James' chapter titled, discrimination and comparison. James began the chapter with a massive direct quote from John Locke(1632-1704) the Father of Classical Liberalism. I leave it to readers to google Locke and James, if they are interested in the many questions involved in our perception and analysis, our dealing with the great coalescence of what we see and what we think.

James used the quotation from Locke to dive into a discussion of how a mind can make discrete parts out of the wholeness of the world. The problem of how to deal with the real world was a serious drawback to the ideas of previous thinkers like Locke who supposed that the mind operated by recording associations between concepts and perceptions as follows:
Experience, from the very first, presents us with concretized objects, vaguely continuous with the rest of the world. The person envelops these objects in space and time; they are potentially divisible into inward elements and parts.

These objects we separate, break asunder and reunite. We must separate them and unite them for our knowledge of them to grow; and it is hard to say, on the whole, which way preponderates, separation or synthesis. But simple sensations are all products of discrimination carried to a high pitch.[Promotional link deleted - MODERAT0R]

Ron Price
1 February 2013

[Echase]

Salt Shaker

The eggs lay dreaming
Stretched out on the pan
The heat of romance
The kiss of butter sweet
Lies
I held it before my eyes
The glass
The soul shaped salt shaker
It looked just like me
Empty