Monthly Archives: June 2021

Leftovers

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Leftovers

I’m feeling bodacious and pregnant with thought.
I’m ready to share everything that I’ve got.
Words weighty, bodacious and perhaps erogenous—
all of the parts of me rare or homogenous—
furnish the page when I’m in writing mode
and equipped to dig into the old mother lode.
I’m fertile with words and with erudition,
all my great plots coming into fruition,
but give me some room at this time of the day
for discarded words to get out of the way.
Don’t read this blog lest it turn you morose,
for you’ll trip over words if you follow too close.

Words abandoned and spurned lie below, broken-hearted—
disjointed phrases that I merely started—
I know it seems silly. Totally absurd,
but please give a small glance at a phrase or a word
that’s left over below, for words have feelings, too.
Steal a few for yourself from this discarded queue
if you should find any appealing to you
and write your own poem when you feel in the zone.
It’s the least I can do to try to atone
for my failure to launch them in poems of my own.
Otherwise, they will lie here abandoned, alone,
with no flesh around them. Words stripped to the bone!

Prompt words today are erogenous, pregnant, furnish, bodacious and mode.

       audacious                       bought          bode

                        tuition           darted      started.     do   glue      imbue

few                   hue   queue. 

                    cue rue stew               sue                 two

come into view                 whew            you                    zoo

verbose
code         goad lode             node rode           toad 
        phone              hone                alone stone
               shone tone    bone

 

Twins: FOTD June 30, 2021

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A bit tattered from the rain but still beautiful. 

One favor please? Can everyone who reads this go to https://judydykstrabrown.medium.com/ and follow me there, please? It is a new site and I need to build followers. There are three free views a month and after that it is $5 a month, but all you need to do to follow is to click the follow button and read a blog or three. I’ll owe you one.

Posted for Cee’s FOTD.

Cruel Games

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Cruel Games

Tonight I am impervious to your charming lies.
They float like a conglomerate behind your velvet eyes.
Save your naughty bedroom tricks for your other hotties.
They hide like buried hatchets under buried bodies—
taloned falcons you disguise as the grip of love,
but I know the difference between raptor and dove.
Cruel actions are not love just because you name them so.
For me love is warm currents and not the hidden undertow.
The game you play may be enough for your other fools,
but the game of love I crave is played by other rules.

 

Prompt words today are conglomerate, impervious, tonight and bury hatchets under buried bodies. Image by Parker Gibbons on Unsplash.

Last Preteen Summer

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Last Preteen Summer

Lemonade days and popcorn nights,
mosquito hums and chigger bites,
stars like bullet holes in the sky
and meteors like years gone by.
On our backs in summer grass,
we buried childhood en masse,
obsessed with coming teenage years
and all our questions and our fears.

Cars passing in the still-warm night
held our expectations tight.
Eavesdropping, we heard the cries
of older girls and older guys
cruising the town unaware
of prepubescent listeners there
 sheltering in my backyard,
watching stars and trying hard
to imagine teenage joys
like nighttime rides in cars with boys.

For the Tuesday Writing Challenge: Lemonade Days.
Cropped image from Diego on Unsplash.
And, since I’ve just been informed that this is last week’s Tuesday prompt, I’m posting to their ‘Promote Yourself Monday‘ link as well.

Exercising Lethargy

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I’m not saying Forgottenman is lazy. I much admire his activity in getting out to mow his lawn once a week in the heat and humidity of the boot heel of Missouri, but let’s just say that otherwise, he is somewhat exercise-challenged, save for trips to Walmart for provisions, to the P.O. for mail or city hall to pay taxes or sauntering from bed to desk, desk to kitchen or laundry room and back again.

Other than those activities, his main exercise has for years been mental, save for a few trips where I’ve jogged his getalong a bit. Thus, I’d like to share with you this brief Skype conversation last night which led to a silly poem this morning:

Judy: Skype says you are active now. What are you doing? Jogging or pushups?
Forgottenman: Doing my lethargy exercises.
Judy: I believe lethargy exercises is a good topic for a poem, don’t you?
Forgottenman:  (Silence)
Judy: (15 minutes later)

Exercising Lethargy

Exercising lethargy? In that I am well-versed,
so pay attention to these moves that must be oft-rehearsed.
Use your pointer finger to call over the waiter.
Then point it at your forehead to jumpstart your debater.
Should you have the catfish or should you have the shrimp?
Do those mental pushups to show you aren’t a wimp.

When you bend down to pull up socks it is a major feat.
Not to mention leg extensions, for they can’t be beat
while slipping into loafers, so appropriately named.
Not to mention hitting targets where the feet are aimed.
Push away from tables when you are fully sated,
for the benefits of arm extensions cannot be debated,

Practice tactics that I’ve taught and I promise you’ll see
what benefits may thus be wrought perfecting lethargy.

Gleaning

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Gleaning

His precipitous departure and subsequent defection
belied earlier avowals of his most sincere affection.
As usual, his action in doing so was heartless—
his cruel revelation of his apathy most artless.

The opposite of nuance, he was blatant to the bone
as he crassly left her weeping to hit the road alone.
Doing her a favor, for he left the door ajar
for another suitor who had loved her from afar

from the time that they were children, but who had never spoken
who now seized this opportunity by handing her a token
that all of his affection he hoped he might expose:
a declaration of his love— single long-stemmed rose.

Carefully, he’d trimmed each  thorn, then ringed the single stem
with his mother’s engagement ring—a brilliant diamond gem. 
And so her recent heartbreak of being the one left
gave way to an elation so she felt much less bereft.

For unbeknownst to him, she had always felt the same,
although she had not shown it, for she feared the shame
of unrequited love if she had revealed how she felt,
but when she saw his token, her heart began to melt. 

And so they were soon married and the day their son was born,
her former love crested the hill, tattered and forlorn
to try to win the love back that he’d cast away so breezily,
only to find abandoned love was not won back so easily.

We learn from all life’s errors, both our own and those of others,
so I want to share this wisdom with my sisters and my brothers.
The moral of the story is be careful what you toss,
for a more farsighted lover may glean profit from your loss.


Prompt words today are nuance, subsequent, revealing, precipitous and heartless.

Glean: to gather leftover grain or other produce after a harvest.

 

There is Always Music

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lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown

This is the young man who was absolutely world class but who can’t read a note of music!

There is Always Music

The music of Mexico is composed of a cacophony of sounds—all of them loud! Trumpets, drums, violins, guitars, tubas and trombones are backed up by fiesta revelers, insects, burros, cattle, roosters, fireworks, church bells, air brakes, stone drills and vendors driving the street with loudspeakers announcing gas, produce, knife-sharpening or bottled water for sale.

Living in Mexico is like living in a place where one or another of your neighbors celebrates a party every other day of the week. Patriotic holidays, weddings, saints days, baptisms, funerals, fifteenth birthdays—all are occasions for fiestas of often grand proportions; and although these parties do not always take place in your own neighborhood, the lake and mountains act as a sounding board which makes it sound as though they do.
Recently, it…

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