I saw the first fellow at the Open Mike I read at yesterday. This fellow’s human had taken the cushion off her own chair and given it to him. The second pair was seen in their cushy bed atop the cabinet in my open-sided garage when I returned home. All’s right in the animal world.
For Cellpic Sunday
Sheridan, Wyoming–the only snow I have been able to walk through for the past 23 years.
Making Tracks
To be in front, you must not mind
that others will be left behind.
The more you gain, the more they lack
trudging along behind your back.
I hope, however, that you’ll be kind
to all of those you’ve left behind.
They’ll be rewarded for what each lacks,
for they can follow in your tracks.
So whether you go fast or slow,
please be careful where you go.
For no matter what you do,
no doubt someone will follow you.
The Prompt for SOCS is “In Front, and/or Behind.”
I can’t believe it. Instead of doing today’s Fibbing Friday, I redid one from May that I’d done before but obviously didn’t remember. I should compare daffynitions and see if I repeated any!
At any rater below are Today’s Actual Fibbing Friday prompts as well as my answers.
1. What is a didgeridoo? Impertinent question asked by your buddies when you got home from a date.
2. What is a wombat? What girls hit a baseball with.
3. What is a jerry can? What Jerry Seinfeld’s brother used to say when his mom asked which of them wanted to sweep the porch for her.
4. What is a beaker? A bird, duh.
5. What is a photofit? A picture that is the right size for the picture holder in your wallet.
6. What is meant by pluck? When you make it to the bathroom in time.
7. What is a cat nap? The direction a cat’s hair grows in.
8. Where will you find a winder? At the funeral of her husband.
9. What is a crosshair? A mad rabbit.
10. What is an effigy? A combination of a rude swear word and an acceptable one.
For Fibbing Friday
For Fibbing Friday the challenge is:
1. What is a Moo Moo? A Moo Moo is the Mau Mau name for cow. (The “Mau Maus” were a group of Kenyan fighters, primarily from the Kikuyu tribe, who engaged in a violent rebellion against British colonial rule in Kenya during the 1950s.)
2. What is a Bow Wow? A particularly primo piece of sports equipment made to deliver an arrow to its target.
3. What is a Gee Gee? An utterance of admiration made by a stutterer.
4. What is a Botty Cough? Sound made by a robot with a cold.
5. What is a Chookie Egg? Breakfast served on a train.
6. What is a Choo Choo? The means of masticating one’s breakfast on a train.
7. What is a Tick Tock? The means of communication of insects that burrow into one’s skin and suck blood.
8. What is a Paw Paw? The left hand(s) of conjoined twins.
9. What is a Heffalump? A cow’s udder.
10. What are Jammies? A baby’s pajamas after feeding himself his own breakfast toast for the first time..
If you haven’t read the other two Clown Nose stories that precede this one, go HERE for the first one. There is a link in the first to the second and a link back to this blog from the second..
OMG. I actually had a hat like that right there handy? Well, no, actually, it was hanging on a coat rack in my bedroom. There is a story to this hat. Bob, the man who was to become my husband, gave it to me the first Christmas after we met. Understand, it was a very expensive handmade Hannabird hat I had admired at an art and craft fair in Santa Monica. (But note that I hadn’t bought it.)
I have only worn it once, when skiing, but it has accompanied me to Mexico where you can see it has finally come in handy, but only as an afterthought.
After wheeling the desk chair that I had propelled myself out to the kitchen in so I’d have a place to sit for the picture on a level with my sculpted accomplice (a Julie Mackey piece–also a gift from Bob) I then rolled myself back to my desk. I’d had a sore back all day and there was something about that activity that actually eased the back pain even though it had been painful propelling myself with my bent legs in a sitting position.
Then, upon surveying the photos of the first photo shoot, I realized how boring my hairdo was in comparison with my sculpted friend, and my mind flashed on the perfect possibility and off to the bedroom I went. In lieu of moving the desk chair back to the kitchen, I moved a chair from the dining room, perched upon it and the picture above is the result.
The first picture below, obviously, is of the chair. The second picture is of the cat, expressing a bit of a shocked expression upon spying me in my hat for the first time. And, just in case you are wondering what Bob gave my mother, who was visiting me in L.A. for Christmas that year, I swear this is true. He gave her Phyllis Diller’s fur coat! She (Ms. Diller, not my mother) had donated it to me for an auction at the Venice Poetry center when I was in charge of collecting donations. At the auction, my mother had bid on it but lost the bid to someone else and was so disappointed. (Bob had told the auctioneer he would up any bid by $10 until the last person stopped bidding, so no one had any idea who had actually “won” the coat.) It was blond with curly long fur and a big satin bow at the neck. Imagine her delight when she opened her Xmas gift and it was THE coat! “Marry the man!” she said, and I did. The only place my mother ever wore the coat was to the next Halloween party she went to, but that was of no importance. She died owning Phyllis Diller’s fur coat.
Click on the three photos above to enlarge.
That said, you would not believe me if I told you the number of albums and bags and boxes of photos I had to go through to find this photo of my mom. I gave up and was packing them all up again when I decided to take one more look through the albums–and believe me, there are dozens of them! I found it in a paper bag of loose pages I’d meant to put into an album ten years ago. And there she was. I have no idea what happened to Phyllis Diller’s coat, but the story of how I obtained it is a story for another day. . . .
Out of gas, I’m cooking custard with the hairdryer. So much for my resolutions to use less electricity!
For: Can You Tell a Story in 18 Words?
Three words to use are: resolutions, custard and hairdryer.
Oh World I Cannot Hold Thee Close Enough
The jet wing like a dolphin cuts through
deep orange, brilliant, fading to gold.
Dark islands of clouds
push through like trees,
above them pale blue bleeding into
an infinite number of ever-darkening shades.
Thumbnail moon, one star, planet bright,
just far enough above the horizon
to be set in the darkest shade that can be blue
before deepening to black.
Scenes like this are like a long slow heart attack
spread over the surface of my life,
my heart exploding from a fullness
that I don’t know how to spend.
I used to feel like this holding
my sister’s newborn child.
I wanted to use his fragile beauty
and the wellspring of love inspired by it,
but lacked direction.
The sunset which first seems to fade
flares more brightly than before–
as, flying West, we keep catching up to it.
We sleep, we read,
move to the bathrooms and back again
shepherding children
like small sheep,
their eyes like berries turned toward the windows
and reflecting back fire.
Jets protrude like fins
which, shaped for reasons aerodynamic,
serve poetry nonetheless
as they swim for hours
into that orange sea.
I cannot get enough of
these colors, want to run to the cockpit
to feel orange wrapped around me like a scarf–
want to paint something significant
from these fiery embers
washing into pale, then deeper ocean blue.
Everything stretches out to a hypothetical vanishing point
seen through an airplane window
as we sit in the dolphin’s womb
waiting to be born.
And there is nothing to be done with this creation
except to create from it.
We are performance artists in this world,
our director sometimes here with us,
at other times distracted–
picking at a hangnail on a clay-crusted fingernail,
paint orange, blue on the cuff of his sleeve
still wet from dolphin fins.
Our purpose here lost like light
fading across an incredible canvas.
Yet everything above
and under us
once given up to night,
swells in us still,
reminding us
to hug the world tighter–
to squeeze life into it and out of it.
Hold it closer,
finding no meaning except being of it
with it in it having it in us.
“Oh world I cannot hold thee close enough!”
Understanding that.
For Ragtag Daily Press, the prompt is picturesque. This is an extensive rewrite of an earlier poem. The title is taken from the first line of a poem by one of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Thanks, Edna, for the inspiration.
False Messiahs
Messages they send out to the world in bottles
(those they think up as they stir their morning cups of chocolate)
—beware their dangers.
These messengers have hands that can slap you awake,
then abandon you as they return to the problems of the privileged rich.
These parasites, dosed with their vitamin B,
ride roughshod over their hosts.
They linger in their beautiful dreams of percentages,
profit on the hunger of the poor.
They see not your skeletons when they look in the mirror.
They do not see the hearts they have broken.
Once, surrounded by the stricken, they put their fingers in their ears
and pretended they were evangelists to the poor.
Then, their illusions shattered by going door-to-door,
they slammed doors shut again.
Their messages in bottles are swift to flow away.
The ocean has no doors to slam in their faces.
And their heads bent in prayer will not open those doors they have closed.
The ballast their bottles carry does no good.
The hunger of the world has no stake in the good books they carry.
The mood of their verses is malevolent. The vows they swear
are words in a wind that has come too late.
For My Vivid Blog the prompt is imposter. Image by Robert Koorenny on Unsplash.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 