Showing Up Late for Happy Hour at the Corner Cantina, For SOCS Apr 27, 2024

Showing Up Late for Happy Hour at the Corner Cantina

Showing Up Late for Happy Hour at the Corner Cantina

I’m late because of accidents and countless little slips
like toothpaste down my shirt front, hair caught in my zips
and a seat belt that was caught and wouldn’t span my hips.

So bring out all your arsenal—your bludgeons and your whips.
I deserve your censure, your curses and your yips.
Perhaps it is my fault that you’re in tequila’s grips!

By looking at the tablecloth and counting all the drips,
It seems that all the salsa’s not contacting your lips,
and all your margaritas aren’t winding up as sips.

I’m making the assumption you might need more chips,
and more salsa fresca and guacamole dips,
which means our busy waiter must make some extra trips.

He doesn’t seem amused by all your clever quips
which increase with the frequency of your little nips,
so I’m hoping the aforementioned will earn him larger tips!

For SOCS: The prompt word is “Show”

4 A.M. for NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 26

full moon morning, jdbphoto 2017

4 A.M.

It is too early to be stirring, the world is still asleep.
The sound is all still slumbering, the darkness is too deep.
No dayness stirs the nightness. No touch is reaching out.
No stirring and no blowing. Not a whisper. Not a shout.
When I wake before the world does, it seems the end of things
instead of the beginning, when the whole world sings.
Sun rises and the birds demand. The dogs whine for their feed.
All the world around me awakens to its need.
But for now, they are all sleeping. It is a lifeless world.
Its eyes and ears and mouth closed, around me densely curled.

for NaPoWriMo we are commanded to write a poem making use of alliteration, assonance and consonance.

For Fibbing Friday. Apr 26, 2024

For Fibbing Friday, today’s enticements are:

1. Who do you associate with ‘green fingers’? The Jolly Green Giant, of course.
2. Who or what was the Red Baron? The Scarlet Pimpernel’s exercise trapeze.
3. What was the significance of yellow ribbons around oak trees? So they could tell the girl trees from the boy trees when trimming out the hedgerows and thus guarantee the next year’s acorn harvesting.
4. Why did Alice follow the White Rabbit? Because she was next in line.
5. Who was The Black Knight?  Balthazar, earlier in his career.
6. What is a Blue Moon? A crude gesture by the guy who sat in the blueberry pie during the picnic.
7. Do brown cows produce coloured milk? Nope, but they are definitely British or Canadian.
8. Why was the Pink Panther pink? Embarrassment.
9. Why are pandas black and white? Mixed panda marriages.
10. What is a Silver Shadow? The effect of sunlight on one of grandma’s best forks borrowed by her grandkids and left sticking up vertically in the sand pile.

Judy’s Advice on Preparations for the Afterlife

Judy’s Advice on Preparations for the Afterlife
(For Jim)

Do you get a discount
or will there be none
when your time on Earth
will finally be done?

Whether it is better
to be raw or roasted well
depends on where you’re going.
Is it Heaven or to Hell?

 

I received this request for a poem from Jim Anshutz:

Some of my thoughts on cremation. 1. I will ask if they give senior discounts.. 2. I will also inform them that I sit out in the sun each day and get quite sunburnt. My question is, “do I get a discount for being pre-cooked? You can take it from here, Jude. Please make this a very humorous piece of poetry. Hit it, Jude🔥🔥🔥

 

 

After 15 Years, for dVerse Poets Apr 25, 2024

If this poem left justifies, click on it to get it to center as it is a shape poem!

After 15 Years

Your memory                                                     cuts so sharply
through my dream’s beginning that I wake,
gasping like a fish on the sand
left by some fisherman
too intent upon his next catch
to end it cleanly.

In its tight skin,
I gasp for air,
rise as it cannot rise
and like you cannot rise
out to that night sea air
which is the only coolness
in a month of burned days.

My memory, curving round,
pulls in the memory of you
like gills seeking to understand
the waterless air.

Landed by some bigger fisherman
whose bait you couldn’t resist,
“Oh,” you said, just “Oh,”
before you took the hook,
slipping from my grasp
as I held on, held on,
let go.

 

This is one of the poems in my book of 50 years of love poems  titled
If I Were Water and You Were Air, about to be published on Amazon.

Posted in response to the dVerse Poets Open Link Night.
See how others responded to the prompt HERE.

Happiness: NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 25

IMG_3962

“Too much happiness or too much unhappiness render us
oblivious to any good or bad changes around us.” 
Alka Girdhar

 Balance

Happiness, like sadness, takes up too much room—
like a greedy house guest usurping our closets with their excess.
What bride notices the homeless on her bridal route?
What new mother thinks first of the starving hidden half a world away?

Sadness, like happiness, eats up our world.
The hungry yearn first for bread,
the ill for surcease from pain.
Who feels the thorn may overlook the rose.

Life is balanced, not within each,
but within the all.
What seems unfair to the single eye
is perfect harmony for the all-seeing.

So much easier
for the fortunate to feel worthy of their lot.
to feel, somehow, that their place in the  world
was created just for them.

Do the cursed feel equally singled out for hunger, cold, pestilence and misery?
Does a master mason have an intended place for every stone?
Does a baker single out a single speck of flour for inclusion?
Is a bee instilled with life to pollinate a certain flower?

What kind consciousness could have borne the guilt
of thinking through a plan more specific than the overplan–
the functioning of the grand machine of the universe
wherein happiness and sadness
swing like a pendulum
that somehow balances all.

 

For NaPoWriMo: What is your idea of perfect happiness?