Tweeting Kim Kardashian
I recall that picture, but you’ve modified it some.
I fear it’s rather naughty to photoshop your bum!!!
Prompt words are recall, picture, modify and naughty. Here are the links:
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/04/14/fowc-with-fandango-recall/
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/04/14/rdp-sunday-picture/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/04/14/your-daily-word-prompt-modify-april-14-2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/04/14/naughty/
All of these photos are either taken from my house or from an area within one block of it. These are photos of just one fire and one flood/avalanche that have decimated the area where I live, and they are nothing, I’m sure, compared to the California fires and the cyclones and tidal waves elsewhere on earth.
A Letter from Mother Earth
All the riches you have stolen may be won in vain.
As you exploit my waterways and open every vein,
surely you can hear me crying out in pain?
When it comes to my riches, each madman wants a piece
at the cost of reason, willing to break the peace.
Will there be no ending? Will the warlords never cease?
As you grow one more spare tire around your spreading waist,
the spoils build up around you: the garbage and the waste.
How much plastic carnage will serve to suit your taste?
As you fill me full of chemicals, I become more weak.
Yet still you spray and pillage, hour by day by week.
The death of soil that nourishes can’t be what you seek!
Fluorocarbons, Roundup, radiation, lead––
all the earth’s blind children just follow where they’re led.
Swallowing all the poisons, devouring what they’re fed.
All the bleating sheep, the entire driven herd
do their best to overlook all the things they’ve heard—
every threat of doomsday, every warning word.
The cyclones swirl above you. The fires burn me bare.
How many floods and blizzards will your children bear?
Why don’t you heed the warnings? Don’t you even care?
When it comes to what you’re leaving to your son and heir,
there may be no more water and there may be no more air.
Does this ever bother you? Do you even care?
If every son and daughter voiced their pleas aloud
and questioned all these foolish sins their fathers have allowed,
would they bend their heads in grief? Can they be shamed and cowed?
If they beg and bargain, if they plead and pray,
will parents listen to the ones who’ve been their prey,
or will they keep on throwing their children’s lives away?
Here is the NaPoWriMo prompt: Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that incorporates homophones, homographs, and homonyms, or otherwise makes productive use of English’s ridiculously complex spelling rules and opportunities for mis-hearings and mis-readings.
Click on photos to increase size. If photos are not sharp at first, please wait a moment to allow for focusing.
If you are following my development of a totally unique new concept in cat food based on the cat’s own preferences, you’ve already seen the rationale HERE and HERE. A suggestion by Forgottenman in the comments of that post has led to my improvement of his suggestion. Namely, a feeding dish on the back of a windup mouse that will cater to a cat’s natural proclivity to pursue his quarry. This system ties into a cat’s wild nature, turning a feline turned domestic once again into a hunter/huntress. Watch your cat’s appetite turn from finicky to ravenous as it gives way to the spell of wild game gained in a wild pursuit. (Flavors available in mouse, rat, squirrel, garter snake and cockroach. Further motivational dispersal systems will soon be available compatible with all of the flavors.)
Disclaimer: Fancy Feast does not indeed make a “Mouse” flavored cat food. I have altered and used their can design only as a means to illustrate my earlier poem. This is a joke, folks!!!!
Disclaimer: Fancy Feast does not indeed make a “Mouse” flavored cat food. I have altered and used their can design only as a means to illustrate my earlier poem. This is a joke, folks!!!!
From Charles Pierce, in Esquire:
“In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, “And we shall overcome.” I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh’s madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing ‘Amazing Grace’ in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
“These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
“And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
“The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.
“Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don’t have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.
Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn’t he a funny man? Isn’t what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now.”
You can read the full text of Mr. Pierce’s article, along with a video of Trump’s speech HERE.
UPDATE 08/13/2025. I posted this in 2019, and it’s been getting many views each day since. Now, 6 years later, I have a new poem of my own to bookend Mr. Pierce’s piece. I hope you’ll read it HERE.
Down in Grandma’s Cellar
Sleeping over at Grandma’s, her rooms all stuffed with treasure
there for my explorations, their pillaging my pleasure.
The barn so full and shadowed with pigeons, mice and more,
I did not venture farther than to peek in through the door.
But the basement was forbidden, so I overcame my fear.
To test my new maturity, I had to venture near.
Down in Grandma’s cellar, I could not see the stars.
There weren’t any planets like Jupiter or Mars.
But still it was as dark as night. The light from one mere candle
seemed the only light the ghosts who lived down there could handle.
As I creaked down the ladder rungs, glass rattled on the shelves
as though the time-dulled canning jars told stories on themselves.
Rhubarb on the nearest shelves, peaches in the back.
Watermelon pickles seemed poised for the attack,
swaying on the upper shelves, dusted by the years.
I gathered up my courage, pushing down my fears.
So many eyes caught in the dark. Glassy gleaming sprites
waiting there to satisfy the family’s appetites.
But no one came to gather them and spread them on a plate.
The waste of it was senseless—their empty, useless fate.
How many hours she’d labored to gather nature’s fruit.
How many other hours used up in the pursuit
of washing, peeling, cutting, and packing them in glass,
packing them in cauldrons and boiling them en masse.
Where did the hungry mouths go? Why did they go untasted?
What happened all those years ago that their richness was wasted?
Accustomed to the secrets kept hidden behind blinds,
we kids retained the questions that stirred our tiny minds.
So many of these mysteries lie hidden in my past.
Remarkable how long their spreading shadows seem to last.
I still have some of Grandma’s old canning jars, now relegated to a decorative use.
(Click on photos to enlarge.)
NaPoWriMo prompt: Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem about something mysterious and spooky!
Then she was so tuckered out that she decided to take a little rest in the hammock.
Lazy April
As the floating clouds of April leave their tracks across the sky,
they keep their rain inside of them. My flower beds are dry.
My characteristic lethargy I fear I’ll have to quell
by getting all the hoses out and turning on the well.
My watering can’s more portable, I could water by hand,
but I am so very lazy, and I fear I’d have to stand
for hours, shedding water everywhere I go.
Watering with a watering can, in short, is way too slow.
I’ll fire up the sprinklers, give the hoses all a jerk
and go back to my hammock and watch them do their work.
The prompts were April, track, characteristic and portable. Here are their links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/04/13/rdp-saturday-april/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/04/13/fowc-with-fandango-track/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/04/13/your-daily-word-prompt-characteristic-april-13-2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/04/13/portable/
Excellent Investment Opportunity!!!
My old cat will not eat her meals of chicken, meat or fishes.
Can after can, they’re offered, but they do not meet her wishes.
And although she’s demanding, calling for food at all hours,
only now and then do I provide food she devours.
I spend a fortune on her food, but still she oft refuses it.
She lowers her nose and sniffs the air, saunters over and peruses it,
gives two licks, then leaves the rest, meowing for some other
as later it is eaten by the dogs or by her brother.
“Fancy Feast” or “Kitty Cuisine”—whatever, she rejects it,
and if perchance she deigns to dine, afterwards she ejects it.
Since somehow at 18 years old, she’s nonetheless abiding,
perhaps they are hyperbole, these things that I’m confiding,
Still, she is particular and more so as she ages.
At 6 a.m. and noon and five and midnight, how she rages.
It makes no difference whether I am sleeping, sitting, standing.
“Now” and “Now” “NEEEEOW!!!!” she yowls, stubbornly demanding.
Lately, I have had a thought (It’s genius and no less)
of how to please her highness re: this culinary mess.
We need to have new flavors of cat food she might like—
rat or lizard, garter snake, hummingbird or shrike.
Why has no one thought of this? It makes such perfect sense.
Cats do not trawl for tuna or sit upon a fence
waiting for turkeys to trot by. They do not fish for trout.
They wait for passing chipmunks or for mice to run about.
I’m starting up a business canning food that she would eat.
She’ll gobble mouse fresh from the can and soon she’ll be replete.
If I can’t find investors, I’m going it alone.
“Judy’s Pest Control and Disposal”––killing two birds with one stone.
Here, if you are interested, is the first stage of development of my innovational new cat food: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2019/04/14/cat-and-mouse/
And here is the final product: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2019/04/14/el-raton-cat-food-motivational-and-dispersal-system/
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 