Monthly Archives: April 2021

More Pitaya, FOTD Apr 27, 2021

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Please click on photos to enlarge.

For Cee’s FOTD

Moratorium

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Moratorium

I’m waging a campaign against your excesses.
You don’t need more shoes or jewels or dresses.
I’m sending a notice to wherever you shop
that your random purchases just have to stop!

Your profligate spending’s way out of control.
Abstemious behavior should be your new goal.
I abhor that I’m having to start this campaign
and hope that my efforts will not be in vain.

I’m not suggesting that you turn ascetic,
It’s simply that your present life is pathetic.
You buy and you buy and you buy and you buy
’til the Amazon boxes are stacked to the sky.

Then you head to the mall to buy a bit more,
’til your closet is fuller, I swear, than the store!
Now my salary cannot keep up with the strain,
so I must insist, dear, you try to refrain.

To help, I have cancelled your credit cards, then
tackled your charge accounts, closing all ten.
I’ve taken you off my bank account, too.
hoping to try to educate you

to the fact that life’s more than spending and spending.
I hope that my excessive acts will be ending
your own excesses, and that you’ll find
new hobbies to fill your acquisitive mind.

Prompt words today are random, abhor, abstemious, ascetic and campaign.

Pitayas: FOTD Apr 26, 2021

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Please click on photos to enlarge.

When I stopped to take these photos, I thought these were flowers, but on closer inspection I realized they were the fruits of the pitaya cactus that birds had evidently discovered before I did. The fruit is delicious. It can be any color inside from purple to yellow to rose to orange and has the seeds, texture and taste of strawberries, although different colors taste slightly different. Once you get the thorns off, it is worth the work of getting to the fruit. Warning, however. Even after you scrape off the long thorns with a sharp knife, there are tiny little black prickly thorns that form a circle around them. They can be very irritating to the fingers as well.

 

For Cee’s FOTD

Eulogy

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Eulogy

Men whistle, catcall, stare and stalk
and even vagrants stop and gawk.
Old ladies cluck their tongues and talk,
but I can’t help the way I walk.

My talent was not learned of late.
It’s rumored that it is innate.
My mom, a flapper in her day,
was zany, silly, clever, gay.

And now I ooze with her pizzazz,
her craziness and all that jazz,
or so Dad says. And long-dead embers
spark in his eyes as he remembers.

She’s only stories heard, a name,
a face within a silver frame
on the nightstand of my dad—
the mother that I never had.

She never held me in her arms
or schooled me in feminine charms,
but I have her spirit and her butt.
In this I am most fortunate.

So I resurrect her daily,
imagining her as I gaily
sway and flirt. It is a token—
a eulogy with no word spoken.

Prompts for today are pizzazz, fortunate,  vagrant, innate and frame. The photo really is of my mother, but the poem is fictional. My mother taught me lots of things, but not how to walk seductively!!! ;o)

Mad Poem: NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 26, Parody

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Mad Poem

We’ve been pinned to our homes
for a year, maybe more,
and after a month
it’s turned into a bore.
We’ve stared at computers
or the walls of our rooms,
our social encounters
just tweets, Skypes or Zooms.
We’ve missed our Starbucks,
the beach and the mall.
Our range of diversions
has been nothing at all.
Restaurant after restaurant
called on the phone
has said they were closed
and to leave them alone.
When we called up our friends,
we had nothing to say
for we did the same things
for day after day.
We yearn for the freedom
that will come with a vacc.
It’s not fair that our elders
can get what we lack!

 

My poem was a parody of the Dr. Seuss poem below:

Sad Poem

 

The NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a parody of another poem. 

I Want to Go On

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I Want to Go On

Lately, I have spent much time thinking about how far into my life I am.  I can’t believe that it is most probably 3/4 completed–if I am lucky!  I’m not ready for it all to be over that soon, but I am caught between enjoying fully what I am doing right now and finding yet another experience to round out my life.  What is important––the moment or the whole?  As much as I love writing all morning, reading blogs, taking photos, nudging my house into line and the serendipity of venturing out a few kilometers to see what life will present—what friends I’ll run into, what new friends I’ll make––I sometimes wonder if there are entirely new adventures farther afield that I should be investigating.  Is there another perfect place to live—people and friends who will bring me closer to a part of myself I’ve never investigated before?  Eight long years after Bob died—when I was ready for one more love in my life—I said that I would not look for someone like him but just be open to the amazing possibilities.  Perhaps some new love would open up an unexplored side of me as he had mined my artistic side. 

I tried to maintain an open mind as I was invited into the personal lives of men who urged me to explore sides of myself that I came to realize that, although titillating, I had no desire to explore.  I had no interest in becoming a second wife in a love triangle or in donning a leather mask or in being humiliated sexually.  I had no interest in being the “all” for any man.  I flirted with the idea of accepting an invitation to take off in a boat or a road trip down to the tip of South America, but in the end, was not desperate enough to take the chance of being stranded mid-ocean in a typhoon with a inadequate captain or riding as a captive sidekick to someone who proved to be more boring than his much-labored-over profile on OKCupid.

In the end, I made a very loving cyber-friend, and repeating a pattern, it seems that this friendship is a substitute that I have convinced myself is enough.  It fills in lonely hours and keeps me from yearning for that actual private touch.  My bed partner is my computer—two of them if the truth be told. One downloads episodes of favorite shows to binge-watch, the other provides a place to to read and comment on blogs I follow, to post new blogs and to read comments from those who have read my blogs.

They reassure me, these readers of my private life published daily on the page.  They applaud my gains in photographic prowess, ask about the adventures of Morrie, the little Scottish terrier left in the wake of a house sitter who first adopted and then abandoned him.  They give advice and seek advice—friends spread out around the world who are always there.  Almost all are supportive, non-combative, interesting, smart, liberal, funny and interesting writers themselves.  Some are outstanding.  They fill in the hours when friends go back to their husbands, dogs go into their beds to snooze—when the activity of the outer world ceases.  Those hours meant to be slept through but into which I cannot surrender myself, hating to give up anymore time to sleep than is absolutely necessary.

Perhaps some part of me is always aware of the very long sleep that awaits me. It is my fear of it that pulls me out of near-sleep into a panic where I cannot breathe—like a foreknowledge of my last gasping breath.  I bolt from my bed to struggle with the key to the barred grid outside my sliding glass door and screen—go outside for the air that escapes me, caught as it is within the room. That panic—that terror of no longer being––what should it drive me towards?  Acceptance? The quest for a new faith? New loves?  New adventures? What am I missing out on that drives me to want more life than I’ve already had? Is there some purpose, some journey, some task that would make me stop fearing the end of everything?  Is there any philosophy that I could convince myself to believe in that would calm my fears of ceasing to be?

Why is it that I have convinced myself that I, of all in the universe, should continue to “be” forever?  For this is what I desire.  I want a long life—longer than that of my mother who died at 91 or my grandmother who died at 96.  I want to go on having adventures, exciting friends of all ages, stimulating thoughts that I will continue to be able to convey to others.  I do not want my life to be three-quarters over. I want to go on.

Iconic Photo

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I have actually met and talked to two of the five men in this photo–
the two on the far left.

Our Better: Nature

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Our Better: Nature

Science just can’t help it. It has to interfere,
trying to come up with things that formerly weren’t here:
pesticides and atom bombs, styrofoam and plastic,
genetic engineering and other “cures” more drastic.

Mother Nature chuckles and sends a flood or fire,
a hurricane or drought or backlashes more dire.
We try to get the best of her, but in the end she’ll win.
for though we try to overlook it, she’s the body that we’re in!

When we seek to alter her, we also alter us.
She’s the vehicle we ride in and we can’t get off the bus.
We’re poisoning her lifeblood and littering her skies,
interfering with her cycles in ways that are not wise.

When we overpopulate, she counters with a virus.
Her avalanches bury us, her floods and mudslides mire us.
If we were Nature’s employees, I think that she would fire us,
bemoaning that decision she made to ever hire us.


Two of my usual prompt sites had not published their word by the time I did my prompt poem today so I only used three prompts. This morning they are published so I’m writing a second poem.The Ragtag prompt today is Help and the Word of the Day prompt is science.

Blind Fashion

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Blind Fashion

They were a fashionable couple, noted for their dress,
attired on all occasions with a unique finesse.

She dressed up on work days in a crinoline and sash.
He even wore a coat and tie when taking out the trash.

Her shape was rather pandurate—thinner in the middle
and very broad down by the hips, rather like a fiddle.

His hair  was thin and patchy with many bald spots that
might have gone unnoticed if he had worn a hat.

So, though they dressed for fashion, they didn’t dress for shape.
He should have worn a tam and she should have worn a cape.

 

Photo from Unsplash, used with permission. Prompts today are  pandurate, work and  finesse,

NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 25: Bad Timing

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Bad Timing

On my birthday in July, my true love gave to me
a coupon for a ski trip and a real live Christmas tree.
Chocolates when I’m dieting, sad songs when I am gloomy.
A grand piano, though my new apartment’s not too roomy.
The week that “Save the Animals” appointed me their chair,
he bought me a new winter coat of lynx and llama hair.

He brings home ice cream in the cold, hot cocoa in the summer.
When I broke my tooth, the peanut brittle was a bummer.
Though his gifts are generous, my thanks are often mimed,
for I’m speechless over just how badly all of them are timed!
The reason why we are not wed is so hard to relate.
I had the cake, the rings, the gown. We set the time and date.

The groom showed up and waited as I walked down the aisle.
My wedding dress was finest lace, my undergarments lisle.
I’d planned each detail out with care and left no stone unturned.
Just one detail  left to him–you’d think I would have learned!
For when I went to say “I do” to this  man I adore,
they found our wedding license had lapsed two weeks before!

 

For NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 25, we are to write a poem about a special occasion.