“Hide” for SOCS

Hide-and-go-seek

She enters my hideout and calls it her own.
Now I’ll have to move on, for my cover is blown.
I try to go deeper into my lair
but still she follows, finding me there.
I cannot escape her. She has all my keys.
She blows through my memory like a fine breeze,
usurping my details to make them her own
so I can’t reclaim them, wherever they’ve blown.
From a full-body mirror, she stares back at me.
My elbow’s her elbow. My knee is her knee.
She alters my hairdo and rouges my cheeks.
She searches my memory, looking for leaks,
then piles the lost parts up in her poems,
through her underground railroad, gives them new homes.
When I see myself spread out here in these pages,
some private part of me protests and rages,
but she doesn’t listen. She finds me too fussy.
She leaves herself open, the ungrateful hussy.
Does she not realize that it is me
who has made her whatever she’s turned out to be?
She should listen more closely when I say to stop.
Allow me to be her poetry cop.
But she doesn’t mind. She says what she wishes.
She dines out on me and leaves me with the dishes!

The prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “Hide.”

Writing a Poem for NaPoWriMo Day 3, 2026

For NaPoWriMo Day 3 we are to write a poem in which a profession or vocation is described differently than it typically is considered to be.

“Different” for the One Word Challenge

When my husband and I did arts and crafts shows, at least once during every show, someone would wander into our booth, have a good look around, and as they left, shrug their shoulders and say, “Well it’s different!” (Usually pronounced “differnt.”) It actually was an “in” joke between those displaying their art—always interpreted as the speaker not understanding and not really liking the arts and crafts. Growing up in a small town, it was not the first time I’d heard the word in its derogatory sense. Thus, this poem: 

“Different”
When I finally made my way into the world so wide
I found myself exotic. Somehow transmogrified.
I liked being the foreigner, eminent in my oddity.
I found that being different was a definite commodity.
It was my prerogative to be just who I was
without creating currents in the small town buzz
of that place I had grown up in. My acts were less explosive.
My strange words now acceptable, not garnered as corrosive.
They thought my weird behavior typical of my nation—
those oddities of word choice and excesses of oration.
In finally being somewhere where “different” was not a sin,
the more different that I was, the more that I fit in!!!

For Fandango’s One Word Challenge: Anomalous. (deviating from what is standard, normal, or expected.)

Easter Fibs For Fibbing Friday

For Fibbing Friday, Apr.3, 2026, the subjects to prompt our fibs are:

1. Why do we have Easter Eggs? Because we ran out of frozen waffles.
2. What makes a Hot Cross Bun? When we leave them in the oven for too long.
3. Why do we have a bunny at Easter? Because we ate the frozen turkey for Thanksgiving.
4. In which country did the Easter Bunny originate? At Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Estate in the U.S.A. 
5. How many decorative balls are conventionally on a Simnel cake? None. Each one is unique.
6.  What is a can? Just one of the dancers in a can-can performance.
7.  What is a can-can? The opposite of a can’t can’t.
8.  What is a cantaloupe?A girl locked into an ivory tower by her father.
9.  What is a canister? A storage container for one’s future to-do list.
10 . What is a candelabra? Extra support for more well-endowed candles in a candlestick.

 

Easter Egg Hunt for Lens Artists Challenge #391

Click on photos to enlarge.

So here are this year’s Easter Egg Hunt photos.  My neighbors Sergio and David generously offered to entertain the doggies while the kids were here to guarantee the safety of the eggs Marie Jose and Yoli helped me to hide. Of 108 eggs filled and searched for, only 8 were not found, even after I offered a 15 pesos reward for each “unfound” egg found. A frenzied, much-motivated search did not reveal these overly-hidden eggs which caused one small girl to ask if it was a joke…ha. At any rate, wish I’d gotten a photo of everyone but I was kept busy trying to insure that everyone got their share of eggs and only one of each color or pattern so everyone received exactly the same mixture of candy. Pizza and Jamaica and watermelon and corn treats were enjoyed by all and the hammocks were enjoyed as well, as you can see. This is my favorite activity of the year, along with the pinata party at Xmas. A week before this hunt, Carmen discovered an egg hidden a year ago..candy still inside..while she was trimming greenery. Hopefully the 8 remaining eggs will be found sooner than that and not by the dogs!!! Happy Easter to All.

For Tina’s Lens Artists Challenge #391

Lifeguards on Duty, for Last on the Card, 3/31/26

for Last on the Card

Killer Clowns and Other Threats

 

Killer Clowns and Other Threats

Robot ghosts from outer space
are in the sky, then in your face.
They sat behind you once in school,
thinking all the world they’d fool,
but recently they have been outed,
so although formerly I doubted
action adventure s crazy plots
of giant creatures and evil bots,
recent events most grieveable
have made such things believable.

This orange devil we’ve elected
and all the buffoons he’s collected
make killer clowns from outer space
less scary than villains we face
day by day in our own world.
So let those forces be unfurled
to fight with him both tooth and bone
so he’ll leave our innocents alone!

Hope “springs” eternal, so I’m using this farcical response to the dVerse prompt this week, no matter how farfetched!!! The hats on the guys  in the UFO are supposed to read “Make Space Great Again,” but couldn’t get AI to cooperate. They came close, so have some of the ICE agents displaying their motto instead. Perhaps they have been in cahoots all along.

The Numbers Game #118. Come Play Along!!

Welcome to “The Numbers Game #118. Today’s number is 240. To play along, go to your  photos file folder and type the number 240 into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos you find that include that number and post a link to your blog in my Numbers Game blog of the day. If instead of numbers, you have changed the identifiers of all your photos into words, pick a word or words to use instead, and show us a variety of photos that contain that word in the titleThis prompt will repeat each Monday with a new number. If you want to play along, please put a link to your blog in comments below. 

Click on photos to enlarge.

 

Ajijic Pier

For Cellpic Sunday

“Hopelessly Devoted” for Word of the Day

Hopelessly Devoted

Time to take a small vacation
from my daily blog oration?
I once had the silly notion
I could end avid devotion
quickly, with a stroke of key
that said that this was going to be.
But it is not tossable.
I found the act impossible.
So here I am right on the dot.
It seems a quitter I am not!

The Word of the Day is “Devoted.”