The week at One Single Impression the prompt is 'Through A Window'.

focus blurred red eyes

mais le soleil est brillant

third floor balcony

le vent c'est très froid

haughty stare distant windows

Allvarligt its ballar lite ur här.

 
Lite svengeksla ska det bli you know!
Jag håller på att bli som Jack Torrance i The Shining  och Norman Bates i Psycho. eller som Cole Sear i The Sixth Sense "I see death people"
Vilken fantastisk blandning eller hur?

Nej vissa människor flyr verkligheten på sina sätt som tex vara otrogen mot sina män eller gå gömma sig på toaletten eller har stora krav på sig uta på krogen att om det inte får ligga med den de vill ligga med så går dem och tar första bästa.

Vissa tar livet av sig eller kanske rånar en bank eller så sitter de hela dagen och stirrar på en vägg.

De lättare skriva ner saker och ting som poppar upp i huvudet sen med andra ord finns privata saker jag inte ens kan prata om.. inte ens med så kallade bästa kompis för han finns inte längre.

Har tappat förtronde för honom och hoppas inte hant tar illa upp att jag skrev så men så är det bara man måste inse sanningen , verkligheten.

Det  känns plötsligt att vissa börja känna sig mogna när det går in i ett förhållande men de är ju en myt man blir inte mognare av det utan de är en prövning i livet som man måste klara det och det är ingen lätt uppgift som alla tror.

Gå in i ett förhållande skaffa barn och tror att allt ska funka men så är det bara inte.
För vissa kan de vara rätt för andra kande vara ett misstag och för tredje kan de vara ett helvete.
Men för mig är det en erfarenhet.

Thats it.

”När jag vaknade i morse kände jag mig på dåligt humör, men det var jag bara glad för, det visade ju att jag hade känslor”

Även om saker kan kännas hopplösa ibland så är det bara att se det positiva, se det som en utmaning där det väntar något gott i slutändan. Du kommer bli belönad, jag lovar.

Saker som medförs om du börjar tänka positivt
* Folk kommer dras till dig, då folk föredrar att vara med positiva hellre än negativa personer (Du blir attraktivare)
* Du blir lyckligare som person, du kommer uppskatta saker mer än vad du tidigare gjort
* Du kommer bli kreativare, då den negativa bara tycks se det dåliga i en sak medans den positiva hela tiden ser möjligheter

Hur blir jag positivare?
1, Där finns alltid två sidor på ett mynt, vilken sida väljer du att se saker ifrån? Den positiva eller den negativa sidan, valet är ditt.

2, Varje gång en negativ tanke kommer upp i ditt huvud ersätt den istället med en positiv, som att du byter ut den dåliga och negativa diabilden i huvudet till en ny positiv bild. Du kommer efter en månads tid märka stor förändring i ditt humör och det kommer spruta av livsglädje omkring dig. Tänk att kunna se en gammal rostig bil i garaget som att det vore en Ferrari eller Porsche som väntade på dig!

3, Ut och motionera, du kommer bilda mängder med endorfiner i kroppen. Endorfiner kan beskrivas som våra belöningshormoner . Det är det naturliga ämne som har störst positiv inverkan på kroppen

”Du kan inte hindra sorgens fåglar att flyga över ditt huvud, men du kan hindra dem att bygga bo i ditt hår!”

Tacksam för alla svar.

Telia är bäst när det gäller mobiltelefoni och kontantkort. Klart billigt är det ju inte men det lönar sig.

07.15.2007
Zero Anon

This work by Zero Anon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

07.13.2007
Zero Anon

This work by Zero Anon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This was written for the Simply Snickers prompt this week - write a poem with the words "day" and "discover". I chose a tanka. Enjoy.

-Nicole
-------------------------------------
day after rainstorm
trees destroyed, branches broken
the rains missed a rose
I discover it, upright
defiant to the storm's winds

Written 6/22/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

its true you know

small matters do matter
and its no small matter
that small matters

currently exploring haiga - haiku with visual ... and this is my first at taiga (tanka with visual) .... it is my 10th haiku/visual exploration ... the tanka grew out of the image and the image grew too, being a stitched landscape ...

let me know what you think ...

>>> Gina

08.03.2007

Zero Anon

This work by Zero Anon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

07.23.2007

Zero Anon

This work by Zero Anon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Never has Death come
To the halls of the Black King,
Nor come close to him
And visited upon him
Its own frigid apathy.

Sitting alone now
On his obsidian throne,
His head in his hands,
The Dark Lord broods upon Death
As It knocks upon the gates.

Glancing once again
Into the Pool of Far Sight,
A smile rises
Suddenly upon the gray lips
On the Demon Prince's face.

All is not lost now.
A wicked cackle echoes
Through the Onyx Court.
He throws himself from his throne
And strides with renewed purpose.

The heroic Knight
Reaches the Onyx Palace
Without his comrades.
With a remorseful look back
At the dead, he presses on.

The glassy gates shake
Beneath the Knight's broad shoulders.
Slowly they open,
Revealing the Lord's courtyard
And the Seraph's goal beyond.

Maki's Blade in hand,
He moves inexorably
Into his dark foe's
Abyssal dominion,
Ready to avenge his men.

Crashing through the doors
Into the castle's foyer,
The Knight's ears prick up
At the sound of cackling
Echoing down the dim halls.

The laughter leads him
Through the crazing labyrinth,
Deeper down into
The palace's catacombs
Where lay the tortured and damned.

His glowing armor
Cuts through the shadows ahead,
Revealing his path
Deeper into Hell's soil
Where death or glory awaits.

-Nicole
---------------------------------------------------------------------
my beeper goes off
then the fire alarm screams
dropped my mop, started
now social worker found dead
in hotel room, I just heard

Written 6/12/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

07.11.2007

Zero Anon

This work by Zero Anon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This is another prompt poem - it was written off of today's prompt from Scott Woods' LiveJournal: the view from a hotel balcony. This was written as a tanka chain.

-Nicole

-------------------------------------------

standing in front of
the king-abernathy suite
the lorraine motel
rectangular collection
of aqua doors and beige walls

“play it real pretty”
were his final instructions
ben was listening
but then ben heard something else
a shot heard around Memphis

six-o-one p.m.
a missile launched from somewhere
an unseen bullet
they all point across the street
death dealt from across the street

at seven-o-five
they pronounced doctor king dead
bewildered still
are the ones left in his wake
unanswered questions remain

Written 6/11/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

Så, detta är skorna som är nyinköpta till skolavslutningen. Antagligen kommer jag att vara vitklädd med svarta detaljer. Men vi får se hur det blir med den saken.
Sommarlov på torsdag. Helt underbart. Och imorgon ska klassen åka ut och bada på långholmen, så jag ska baka cupcakes med rosa jordgubbsglasyr till alla mina små söta vänner x3

Nu känner jag mig absolut tvingad till att skriva ner min, Lovisas och Jossans högst seriösa [eller inte] tanka. [Tanka är en japansk diktform sär stavelserna ska gå 5-7-5-7-7 och under de två sista raderna ska en förändring ske i dikten]

Rosor är röda
Viol är blå som havet
Du är som socker
Och högusen är gråa
Och asfalten är uppvärmd

Oerhört seriöst.
Jag har däremot börjat skriva en mer seriös novell. Jag funderar på att lägga upp den här när jag är färdig.
Vi får se hur det blir med det.

Här är förresten Diagnosis med Dawn of ashes, en bra låt, om man är förtjust i den sortens musik.

-Julia

To understand this better, it might be helpful to consider another form of verse that originated in Japan and was both very popular and very old -- the waka.

We know that hokku (in English) consists of three short lines, which are derived from its old Japanese form of 5, 7, and 5 phonetic units -- seventeen in all.  The waka, by contrast, has two additional segments, each of seven phonetic units, making the whole verse 5,7,5,7,7.  Visually (in English) it looks like a hokku  with two additional "long" lines added to the end.

We would be wrong to think, however, that waka is a hokku with two extra lines.  A hokku is not poetry.   That means a hokku does not use conventionally "poetic" words and phrases, does not try to be "poetic."  In hokku the poetry is not in the words but in the sensory experience they convey, and that is something quite different.

Waka, on the other hand, is very consciously poetic.  It aims for a certain effect, specifically a beautiful effect, and to do that it may -- as is often done in Western poetry as well -- stretch the truth a bit to achieve that effect.   Blyth says, quite effectively, that we can think of waka as "decorative."  It is not as much interested in things as they are as in making poetry out of them.  That is something not done in hokku.

And that is also why waka, traditionally, includes romantic relationships, something hokku avoids.  And used with a different meaning, we can say that waka in general aims for the romantic in the more literary sense -- an emphasis on imagination, emotion, and introspection.  In hokku the writer often disappears in the subject, and in fact must get out of the way so that Nature may speak; in waka the writer is often very evident, as is emotion.

It was often said that hokku was a "male" verse form, while waka was "female."  We should not take this too literally, because men too wrote waka and women sometimes wrote hokku, but in general it corresponds to conventional ideas of male and female -- the male being more objective and realistic, the female being more dreamy and romance oriented.  Of course we must be wary of using that rigid stereotype today, but it does help us to understand the differences between hokku and waka.

Many readers here will also have heard of renga.  Renga is essentially a linked sequence of waka, composed by two or more people.  The aim in renga, as in the single waka, was poetry.  The language was formal and "high," and the earthy and commonplace were excluded as inappropriate for the elevated tone of the verse.  It was only with the rise of "playful" linked verse, called haikai no renga, that ordinary subjects and "common" language were mixed into linked verse, and that is how the hokku as we practice it came to be -- a verse mixing high and low, dealing with ordinary things, and aiming not for beauty, but rather for significance.

But let's return to waka.  Here is an anonymous example:

Smelling
The fragrant orange blossoms
That wait for June --
Recalling the fragrant sleeves
Of someone in the past.

  It is, as Blyth characterized waka, "the lyrical vague, the cloudy emotional, the dreamy forlorn."

In the following 10th-century waka by Ariwara Motokata we find the same emphasis on beauty, a conscious effort at poetry that stretches the truth to achieve an effect:

Mist rises
On the far off mountains
Of spring;
Blown here on the wind --
The fragrance of flowers.

Here is another waka by a different poet:

The wind
Stirs the orange blossoms
Wet with rain;
The mountain nightingale
Sings among the clouds.

It is all just too perfectly beautiful, which is why Blyth calls it "decorative" verse.   By contrast, Tohô, a student of Bashô, tells us that

Spring rain falling on a willow is, in general, renga;
A raven catching mud snails is simply haikai.

That is a good expression of the aesthetic difference between waka (here manifested in linked verse -- renga) and hokku as found in the "new" kind of renga -- playful linked verse (haikai no renga).  A raven catching snails is definitely NOT a subject for waka or the old renga.  It is not conventionally beautiful, and is certainly not the kind of elevated, traditional subject a waka poet would have used.

I often think, however, that it would be possible to "hokkufy" the waka form, just as the "waka" form of linked verse led to the "haikai" form of linked verse that gave us hokku as we know it.  One need only apply the aesthetics of hokku to waka by removing the emphasis on the conventionally beautiful, by removing inappropriate subjects such as romantic love, and by introducing the simple and the common -- ordinary things in ordinary words, as we find in hokku.  If one were to avoid consciously striving for the conventionally beautiful, and instead used the form -- as in hokku -- to achieve significance, one would have a new kind of waka very much in the hokku aesthetic, a verse form that does not sacrifice truth for the sake of conventional beauty, and yet a verse form that remains intimately connected to Nature and the changing seasons.  It might also be a helpful antidote to the excesses and oddities of what is now called the modern tanka, just as hokku is a healthy antidote to much of what is called haiku today.

David

Någonstans där i mellan är man tvungen att dra en linje som säger; I säng tidigt, jobba hårt!

Sedan jag nu till mestadels spenderar min kognitiva tid på arbetet så känner jag mig både utsatt och smått utmanad i att finna och behålla nya bekanta. Tyvärr är det inte riktigt de stora filosoferna man umgås med men de är inte dumma på något vis. 

Det intressanta är att jag nu har en mycket mer strukturerad livstil, jag håller igång på jobbet vilket ger mig min dagliga om inte lite extrema workout. Det är ett tufft jobb men det skapar ett visst syfte för min tillvaro. En helt klart värdig utmaning, inget mer.. Jag ser inte att jag kommer stanna en längre tid på denna arbetsplats men upplevelsen är väl värd min tid. 

Min sfär har blivit mindre än den någonsin varit, Jag rör mig mellan arbetet och hemmet. Känns smått ensamt och begränsande till den del att jag inte kan ventilera allt som jag har flygandes i mitt inre. 

Jag har filosoferat över olika kapitel i mitt förflutna och funnit att jag alltid varit dragen till det "nya" kännt ett växande intresse för nästa "äventyr", något som sällan genomförts och när det väl gjorts har jag häpnat över hur folk vågar ta dessa kliv ut i den osäkra världen. 

Nu är jag i en position att påverka mitt livs vägval och lockelserna finns där bakom hörnet. 

En känsla av att jag gör någon besviken är en av de värsta upplevelserna jag ganska ofta får. Vad begär folk av mig?? Mycket tydligen.. Men jag känner att folk vill minst lika mycket som jag ventilera alla frustrationer och irritationer på något sätt. I deras fall på mig.. 

För mig är det enormt smärtsamt att känna att jag gör någon besviken, även när jag själv blir besviken på mina egna vägval. Dock är det svårare att frige sig själv från sitt egna dömmande. 

Har man lyckats i livet om man evigt engagerat sig i massvis med olika aktiviteter? Rest världen över? Skaffat sig en fantastiskt karriär?

Jag tror i längden inte på det, jag gillar att vara aktiv och känna mig viktig i ett större sammanhang.

Men allt detta är bara möjligheter, möjligheter till att finna sann lycka,

inre frid. 

Facing now their glaives
And spears, barbed to rend the flesh,
Not once does he flinch
Or break his valorous charge
For fear of death or yet worse.

A Pit Lord stands tall,
Swinging a flail of green steel,
Blocking the Knight's path.
Struck in the chest by the beast,
He falls to the blackened ground.

The Knight stands quickly,
Dodging a blow from the beast
Which sends ash flying
From the chthonian soil.
This battle has just begun.

The combat rages
As the black sun creeps upward
Into a dark sky,
To its tenebrous zenith,
An omen of blood to come.

The Knight fights fiercely
With his fiendish counterpart,
Both parties focused,
Oblivious to the melee
That slaughters their brethren.

Man against devil,
Steel parries steel, steel rends flesh.
Blood in red and black
Swirls together and pools
In the mortar of these streets.

The obsidian roads,
Slick now with blood, and broken,
Showing sharp edges,
Crushed by hooves and armored feet
Shriek, and mourn their masters' deaths.

Through all this he fights,
The paragon clad in steel
That glows like the sun.
His clothes soaked by blood and sweat,
His muscles burn, his heart aches,

But he does not fall,
As he takes punishing blows
From the demon's flail
And returns the strikes in kind,
Scoring its leathery hide.

As the umbral sun
Once again begins to dip
To the western sky,
The Knight Seraph grits his teeth
And prepares to finish this.

Fortunately the historical facts are clear, and it is a simple matter to determine that the term hokku is in fact the correct and proper term, and that "haiku" began to be popularized by Shiki, who had an agendum of his own, near the end of the 19th century.   But think how many have been ignorant of that basic historical fact for decades!

If one reads the book A Haiku Path, which details the founding period of the Haiku Society of America from 1968 to 1988, it is clear where some of the obfuscation originated.  There was a concerted effort in that society to declare the term "hokku" obsolete!   (the Society even actively worked to get its new definitions adopted by "editors of encyclopedias and dictionaries"). 

A similar revisionism has taken place in other originally Japanese verse forms.  What was for centuries called waka (literally "Japanese verse" to distinguish it from Chinese verse) is now, again after the revisionistic influence of Shiki, called "tanka" (literally "short verse").  But if I were to write modern verse in English that preserved the essence of waka, I would want to call it waka, because tanka has come to mean almost any kind of free verse written in approximately five lines, and generally it has virtually nothing in common with the aesthetics of the old waka.  Again, as in the case of the pushing of "haiku" instead of the accurate "hokku" by various haiku societies and individuals, there appear to be modern agenda involved in these linguistic obfuscations.

We find the same thing in the move to replace the centuries old term "renga" with "renku" in the English-speaking world.

Generally those most vocal in supporting such confusing linguistic revisionism are those who are involved in writing or promoting revisionistic forms of these verses -- those who, for example, want to see the modern "free verse" haiku take the place of  the standards and aesthetics of the old hokku,  or see the free verse tanka take the place of the old and more challenging waka, or to see whatever is currently promoted as renku take the place of the standards of the centuries-old renga.

There is something very distasteful in all this.  In practice, by erasing the term "hokku" through declaring it obsolete, one would also simultaneously erase, in modern practice, the principles and standards of the hokku as applied from the 17th to the 20th century, replacing them with the near complete lack of principles and standards and generally quite different aesthetics of modern haiku.   And in fact that is what nearly happened -- hokku nearly disappeared.

The same happens when one replaces the term "waka" with tanka.  Modern tanka is generally nothing like the old waka, and so removing the correct term also commonly removes, in actual practice, the traditional standards and aesthetics.  And of course the same may be said of erasing "renga" in favor of "renku."

It is time to end such historical obfuscation and linguistic manipulation.   Whether intentional or unintentional, an agendum behind pushing revisionistic terms not only confuses historical fact but also destroys the traditions, principles and standards behind these centuries-old verse forms, replacing them with modern ersatz English forms that are simply not the English-language equivalents of the old forms.

What can one do about this problem?  Often we need only point out the easily verifiable historical facts.  Bashô wrote hokku, not haiku; the modern tanka in English is essentially a Westernized free verse form that has virtually nothing in common with the waka; renku today is often not at all like the traditional renga.  People inherently want to be accurate, and when shown the incontrovertible and obvious facts they will generally accept them, given time and the prevalence of common sense.   But it requires a willingness to be careful with language, to avoid careless and  sloppy and inaccurate approximations (no misrepresenting hokku as "haiku," for example); it requires accuracy with definitions, and certainly great reluctance in foolishly declaring any accurate and meaningful term "obsolete."  Above all, it requires a willingness to stand up to propagandistic manipulation of language by this or that movement or individual.

Whenever I read the accounts of the Haiku Society of America trying to convince editors of encyclopedias and dictionaries that the word "hokku" is "obsolete," I always think of Mark Twain's response after he was mistakenly thought to be dead -- "The report of my death is an exaggeration." 

The solution to all this is simple.  If we are talking about hokku, we call it hokku; if we are talking about waka, we call it waka; if we are talking about renga, we call it renga.   Do not confuse these traditional forms with what today is being written and presented in books, journals, and online sites as haiku, tanka and renku, which are, for the most part, simply modern Western accumulations of free verse presented, for reasons best known to their promoters, under those titles. 

David