Goodbye Note to Harvey
I’m gobsmacked by your foolishness, tired of your guff.
Your tales of glory are too much and this girl’s had enough!
Your mercurial rise to fame, your hobnobbing with stars,
only bought you membership in a club with bars.
Now they are behind you, the power, women, booze.
I trust they’re not available in the cellblock where you snooze.
Prompt words are gobsmacked, mercurial, snooze, membership and guff. Image by Grant Durr on Unsplash, used with permission.
How to Find a Poem
Only a fool waits for a poem to come to him.
You have to call for it like a proper blind date,
knocking on its door
and seeing beauty in whatever opens it.
Take it dancing.
Twirl it around the floor,
letting words fly off in all directions.
Leave what flutters off alone.
Someone else will pick it up
and dance with it.
No word is a wallflower,
although some are chosen more frequently to dance.
Those are the words to avoid.
Do not always choose the prettiest words.
In the dance of the poem,
the ugliest of words acquire a charm.
Do not insist that you yourself lead.
Let the poem, instead, draw you
off the dance floor,
out the door
and down the path
to deep woods
where all the wild words live.
Gather them in bouquets
or weave them into chains
to crown your head––
that head of the poet
who follows where the poems go
and collects them by armfuls to share with the world.
The last NaPoWriMo prompt for the year 2021 is to write a poem in the form of a series of directions describing how a person should get to a particular place.
This little vermillion flycatcher bird loves to perch on the agave blooms to put their vivid hues to shame. I snapped this with my phone as my camera was hiding in a basket in the house, sulking over its lack of use since I started carrying my iPhone in lieu of it. The photo would have been better with the camera, but alas, I could not have fit my camera into my pocket so probably would have had no photo at all.
For Cee’s FOTD
Though you’re unaware that you’re in my view,
as you sit parsing sentences, I’m parsing you.
And though you may find my excuse to be spurious,
I’m not lascivious. I’m only curious.
I peer through your window to discover a clue
if tight-lipped and buttoned-up is the real you.
I peek through a bush after climbing your fence.
Do you underline verbs and determine their tense?
No bushes or flower vines hamper my vision
to soften the view or to curb my derision.
Your life is as clear and empty and sparse
as the students you aim for and lines that you parse.
Every inch covered from your toes to your chin,
terry cloth robe. No booze and no men.
No bright colored pictures to cover your wall.
Not one detail to alter your image at all.
You sit at a desk looking tired and grim,
pallid and stringy and scrawny of limb—
essays piled to left and to right,
your strict narrow lips revealed in the light.
Everything minimum, like you have taught.
Strip sentences bare. Make them sparse, clear and taut.
Then you push back your chair, straight-backed and hard-seated
and seem to sigh. Is your patience defeated?
As you move to the window, a surge of past fear.
Have you sensed an old student is hovering near?
As you come to view the moon’s budding crescent,
I slip over the fence and become evanescent.
On day 29 of NaPoWriMo, they urged us to peek into a window and tell what we see.
Meanwhile, the prompts from five other sites were: curious, hamper, evanescent, parse and minimum.
He wants to know what’s all this fuss
about being unscrupulous.
Honor to him is just a fable—
His every act meant to enable
a law or bill or legal tort
as a means to then exhort
his cronies to increase his fame
to pad his pockets and laud his name.
His vacant eyes contain naught
of what he did for what he’s got.
A patriot for sure he’s not.
If I were forced to make a list
of all the ways he is not missed,
I fear the list would stretch so far
as Katmandu or Zanzibar.
And though I know them all by heart,
I do not have the time to start
at the beginning and reach the end.
So I’ll just say, here and anon,
that I’m relieved that he is gone.
Prompt words today are enable, scrupulous, vacant, list and exhort.
Photo by Srikanta from Unsplash, used with permission.
The NaPoWriMo prompt today is to write a poem that is a series of questions. Mine are all song titles save for one famous line from literature.
Mean Woman Blues at the Corner BarHim: What’s up Pussycat? Are you lonesome tonight?
Her: Can you mend a broken heart?
Him: Do-ya do-ya do-ya do-ya wanna dance?
Her: Who are you?
Him: Hello, Hello. Bad, bad Leroy Brown. What’s your name?
Her: Hello. Mary Lou!
Him: Ever dance with the Devil in the pale moonlight?
Her: Who let the dogs out?
Him: If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?
Her: What’s going on? Hang on, Sloopy!
Him: Wouldn’t it be nice?
Her: (Looking down,) Is this a dagger which I see before me?
Him: Can’t you see, can’t you see?
Her: Is that all there is?
Him: Do you really want to hurt me?
Her: Would you still love me tomorrow?
Him: What’s love got to do with it?
Her: How did it get so late so soon?
Him: Does anybody really know what time it is?
Her: Should I stay or should I go?
Him: Do ya think I’m sexy?
Her: (taking out her car keys) Do you know the way to San Jose?
Him: Are you going to go my way?
Him: (To her back as she walks out the door) What’s goin’ on? Am I that easy to forget?
Him: (To the room at large) Can’t you see, can’t you see what that woman, she been doin’ to me?
A stander-by: What I can see clearly now is what becomes of the broken-hearted!
In case you want to play along or read more poems written to this prompt, here is the NaPoWriMo prompt . Photo by Milo Bauman on Unsplash, used with permission. If you doubt any of the song titles or want to know who sang them, just Google them. I ran out of time or I would have made links.
For Cee’s FOTD
Here is the link to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
Here is the link to today’s NaPoWriMo’s prompt.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 