Jammed-Up Creativity
Dark genius sits there pondering and staring at the screen.
His features in reflected light glow a sickly green.
He works his cyber screwdriver slightly to the right.
His only tool––the keyboard––is his weapon in this fight
as every blog on WordPress skews slightly all at once.
He’ll show his third grade teacher for calling him a dunce!
He tugs a little here and there, adjusting cyber screws.
And just for fun, he adds a few zeroes to my views.
He knows that I am watching and he senses my excitement.
He chuckles that my false success has been at his incitement.
Then he shuts down the internet––Facebook, WordPress, Twitter.
and my seconds of great happiness turn just as quickly bitter.
Bloggers the world over are turned back onto themselves.
Photos trapped in media files or stacking up on shelves.
No place to reach out for a friend for shut-ins who, once freed
to roam a universe of blogs now sit in dire need
of someone just to talk to. To realize they are there.
They sit staring at their screens, though all of them are bare.
Week after week we wait for our deliverance from this blight.
We miss the internet all day, and even more at night.
I’m thinking about former friends, now lost across the miles,
tripping over poetry surrounding me in piles,
thirsting after comments about every brand new thought.
Having no fast outlet, my brain feels like it’s caught.
Bound up in old creations that have no place to go,
with no easy outlet, the thoughts are coming slow.
Jammed up creativity is worse than constipation,
for writing with no readers is just mental masturbation.
It’s true that I have friends to call and writers’ groups as well.
But they have not the patience to hear all I have to tell.
A blog gives me an avenue to fill out a whole world
with thoughts that for a lifetime, I’ve kept inside, tightly furled.
For those of us who always have felt slightly alone,
the Interweb has seemed a placed created to atone.
In the darkened hours when others are asleep,
we live that midnight life we’ve kept within us, buried deep.
History moves ever onward despite glacier, war or flood.
We see it trailed behind us in footprints etched in blood.
So we’ll survive the cyber war when it comes to pass
by spending more time with our friends, calmly smoking grass
or sharing drinks at Starbucks, devoid of texts or apps,
but we’ll miss our midnight family filling in the gaps.
For SOCS the prompt is Jam
The words to define for Fibbing Friday this week are:
1. Embiggen: What you seek to do by peering through a microscope or magnifying glass.
2. Eargasm: What you often hear through the walls of cheap hotels.
3. Erumpent: A description of middle age spread.
4. Eldritch: A title for moneyed senior citizens.
5. Epizootic: A category of TV episodes that depict animals in confinement.
6. Frabjous: Fragile joyfulness
7. Floo-fla: A misdiagnosis for Swine Flu.
8. Fipple: A small unintentional untruth.
9. Floop: A urine specimen provided to test for influenza
10. Fizgig: A job in a mineral water bottling company.
That Point
It was at that age
of worrying about others,
of feeling not enough,
of looking for a pattern that was myself
that I put words down,
fearing them
or if not them, fearing those who read them.
At that age when I didn’t know what I thought,
I was astonished that the hand that wrote
knew more than I did
and taught that I must be brave,
fearless on the page in a way I had not yet learned to be in life
so that I became a writer to teach myself.
To have someone I trusted as a guide.
It was at that age when I wanted to be admired––
that age when I sought to be loved––
that age when I yearned to be thought a thinker,
important, listened to––
that I was somehow encouraged to listen to myself.
There are these times we are led to by life
that become turning points
so long as we continue.
That sentence. That first sentence stretching
into the future, into now.
I’m republishing this poem from 2016 for the dVerse Poets Krisis (Turning Point) theme. April 12, 2025 on Open Link Night, Apr 10, 2025
“Sisterly Squabbles”
A little weep, a little sigh,
a little teardrop in each eye.
Grandma Jane and her sister Sue,
one wanted one hole, the other, two
punched into their can of milk.
(All their squabbles were of this ilk.)
The rest, of course, is family fable.
They sat, chins trembling, at the table.
When my dad entered, we’ve all been told,
their milk-less coffee had grown cold.
For the W3 Challenge. this is the prompt: Two voices. Two perspectives. Tension lingers in the air. Can they find common ground? Will the conversation spark understanding or fracture further? You decide.Write a poem—any form, or none at all—that captures the heart of a difficult conversation.
My grandmother and her sister had a lifetime of such “differences.” It might have begun due to the events revealed to me by my Aunt Stella, my grandmother’s daughter. Years after the deaths of both my grandmother and her sister, I had asked my dad’s sister why there seemed to be so much antagonism between my grandmother and her sister, whom we called “Aunt Susie,” even though she was really our great aunt. My Aunt Stella, a good church lady, revealed to me then what she thought was the crux of their antagonism. My grandmother had, before my grandfather, been married to a different man whom she never ever mentioned to us, although her sister Margaret had mentioned him on occasion to us as *”That Black Devil!” Grandma had one daughter with that husband, my Aunt Margie, but then divorced him and married my grandfather and had two more children, my father and my Aunt Stella, who told me the following tale. It seems as though Aunt Susie once visited my grandmother and “The Black Devil” in their tiny one-bedroom house. When bedtime came, there was only one choice…one bed..and so of course they all three shared it. “But, my aunt said, unfortunately, my grandmother made the mistake of putting her husband in the middle and during the night, she woke up and found he and her sister were, well, um…they were having sexual intercourse!” That was perhaps the only time in her life my Aunt Stella ever said those words and the fact that she told me was amazing. No one else in my family had ever heard this story but we had surely all wondered why in that time when divorce was unheard of, my grandmother had chosen to divorce “That Black Devil.” Years later, when I chose to go to a family reunion of my Aunt Margie’s family, all descendants of that “Black Devil,” (although I don’t think any of them ever met him since my Aunt Margie was raised by my grandmother and her second husband who had moved the family from Iowa to South Dakota) none of them had never heard the story, either. It certainly would explain, however, the lifetime of nit-picky bickering between my grandmother and her sister.
* In calling my grandma’s first husband, “That Black Devil,” my Aunt Margaret was describing his soul as black, not his skin.
The party was on at a Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournament at the president’s Doral resort in Florida and a fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago, even as markets tumbled.
Eric LiptonTheodore Schleifer and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
Eric Lipton reported from Trump National Doral in Miami, Theodore Schleifer from Washington, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Palm Beach, Fla.
The financial market meltdown was underway when President Trump boarded Air Force One on his way to Florida on Thursday for a doubleheader of sorts: a Saudi-backed golf tournament at his family’s Miami resort and a weekend of fund-raisers attracting hundreds of donors to his Palm Beach club.
It was a fresh reminder that in his second term, Mr. Trump has continued to find ways to drive business to his family-owned real-estate ventures, a practice he has sustained even when his work in Washington has caused worldwide financial turmoil.
The Trump family monetization weekend started Thursday night, as crowds began to form at both the Trump National Doral resort near Miami International Airport, and separately at his Mar-a-Lago resort 70 miles up the coast.
Mr. Trump landed on the edge of one of the golf courses in a military helicopter — just in time for a dinner at Doral. The next day, LIV Golf, the breakaway professional league backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, was scheduled to hold a tournament at the course for the fourth time.
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On Thursday at Mar-a-Lago, hundreds of guests gathered for the American Patriots Gala, a conservative fund-raiser that featured Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and President Javier Milei of Argentina, who told his supporters back home that he was hoping to catch up with Mr. Trump while there, seemingly unaware that Mr. Trump was double-booked at two of his family properties that night.
And that was just the weekend’s lead-up.
Mr. Trump ordered a new set of global tariffs on Wednesday from the White House using his trademark Sharpie pen, a version of which is on sale at Mar-a-Lago for $3.
The announcement set off one of the largest market crashes in American history, erasing $5 trillion in market value from companies in the S&P 500 in just two days. Mr. Trump has said his policy would reverse what he calls unfair trade practices, and that eventually the “markets are going to boom.”
On Friday, as markets continued to tumble, thousands of golf fans visited Doral, as did Eric Trump, Mr. Trump’s son, and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s $925 billion sovereign wealth fund. Mr. Al-Rumayyan is also the chairman of LIV Golf, and was there to see its stars compete.
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“It is a nice club,” Mr. Al-Rumayyan said as he walked around the golf course watching the players tee off.
LIV Golf — a venture intended to lift the Saudi profile worldwide even as it has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars of state funds — is styled as a daylong party, with club music pumping out of speakers lining tournament courses and machines dispensing wine and large beers. On Friday, fans watched a bit of golf and danced on the edges of the course. Others in MAGA hats walked around smoking cigars.
In short, the economic turbulence seemed far away.
“You are all looking a little too stiff!” said Matt Rogers, a LIV Golf announcer, as he yelled into a microphone, blasting his message across the greens as the first group of golfers on Friday prepared to play with dance music blaring in the background. “You need to turn this up! This is LIV Golf.”
Every room at the 643-room Trump Doral, including the $13,000-a-night presidential suite, was sold out through the weekend. Not a seat could be found at the BLT Prime steakhouse bar, where a porterhouse steak cost $130.
“This is the perfect venue,” Eric Trump said as he strolled the golf course Friday.
He had driven his father in a golf cart from the military helicopter to the resort dinner the day before, as the festivities over the big moneymaking weekend were getting underway.
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The president spent much of Friday at yet another Trump family venue, Trump International Golf Club, not far from Mar-a-Lago, sending out social media messages during the day, including, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE.”
By Friday night, the center of attention had shifted back to Mar-a-Lago, as Mr. Trump held another in a series of $1 million-a-head dinners at his private club in Palm Beach.
Since he was elected in November, Mr. Trump has hosted at least four of the fund-raisers, including one in December, two in March and the one Friday night, with a fifth planned for April 24.
The fund-raisers unfold in similar ways, according to people who have attended them.
Roughly 20 people gather around a candlelit table with big white flowers in the club’s “White and Gold Room” after a photo session. Mr. Trump speaks, then listens to the guests discuss their businesses, one by one. In just an hour or two, he can raise as much as $20 million — a great return on his time investment, associates say.
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Attendees at some of the post-election dinners at Mar-a-Lago hosted by MAGA Inc., one of Mr. Trump’s fund-raising political action committees, have included the casino owner Miriam Adelson, the sugar magnate Pepe Fanjul and James Taiclet, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest military contractor, along with representatives from the cryptocurrency and energy industries.
On Friday, Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir, and Steve Wynn, the former casino executive, both billionaires, were among the guests at the Mar-a-Lago fund-raiser, according to two people briefed on the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the event.
The dinners have been just the start. Mar-a-Lago remains a popular site for Republican candidates to host their own fund-raisers, Federal Election Commission records show. It is not clear to some Republicans why Mr. Trump has been raising money so aggressively, according to eight people involved in conservative fund-raising who have kept track of his Mr. Trump’s efforts. Never before has a president ineligible for re-election vacuumed up so much money for a super PAC.
Some of Mr. Trump’s associates believe it is prudent to fund-raise when the money is available, as corporate interests and others seek to get access to the president or make amends for perceived slights, people close to him acknowledge.
The packed agendas at the two Trump venues recalled the constant buzz and spending by lobbyists, members of Congress and foreign leaders at Trump International Hotel in Washington before the Trump family sold its lease after Mr. Trump’s first term.
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In addition to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, top sponsors of the Doral golf tournament included Aramco, the Saudi oil company; Riyadh Air, the airline owned by the sovereign wealth fund; and TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media company whose fate Mr. Trump is helping to decide, according to a large billboard outside one of the event’s party tents.
Mr. Trump’s merchandise shops — there are at least three of them at Doral — were also doing swift business, selling everything from a $550 Trump-branded crystal-studded purse to $18 Doral-branded paperweights made in China. The store clerk said that he did not know if new tariffs on imported products would mean price increases.
Fans in the crowd said that they had traveled from as far as South Africa to attend the event. Some purchased special tickets that cost as much as $1,400 to enter exclusive party areas with free drinks and food — tickets that were sold out as of Saturday.
In interviews, tournament attendees and others said that they did not mind the disconnect between the Wall Street meltdown and the events at the Trump properties.
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“The sky is falling every day,” said Mike Atwell, a Key Largo, Fla., restaurant owner who was attending the LIV event with his wife enjoying lunch and drinks. “When you are happy, you drink. When you are sad, you drink. It all works out.”
Tyrell Davis, a 39-year-old entrepreneur spending Saturday afternoon in Palm Beach, said that he admired Mr. Trump for focusing on his own businesses while also implementing tariffs that he believed would benefit Americans.
Mr. Davis said that the United States had given away money to other countries for years while not investing in American cities, and that it only made sense Mr. Trump would continue to bolster his own businesses while in office.
“It’s all about business and money,” Mr. Davis said. “That’s what it’s all about. America is a business. It’s a corporation.”
On Saturday, as the tournament continued at Doral, Mr. Trump showed up at yet another family golf course, in Jupiter, Fla., which is holding its own, more modest tournament.
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Good news was announced by the White House staff: “The president won his second round matchup of the senior club championship today in Jupiter, Fla., and advances to the championship round on Sunday.” Reporters and photographers were prohibited from watching him play, and were held down the street at a coffee shop.
As Mr. Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago, one of his political committees sent out an offer to his followers: They could buy a signed replica of his executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The minimum contribution was $50. “I want you to have a PIECE OF HISTORY in your home,” Mr. Trump said in the solicitation.
The White House then announced that there would be no more public events on Saturday.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.
Eric Lipton is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad range of topics from Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals. More about Eric Lipton
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world. More about Theodore Schleifer
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration. More about Zolan Kanno-Youngs
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Welcome to “The Numbers Game #67” Today’s number is 188. To play along, go to your photos file and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos you find that include that number and post a link to your blog in my Numbers Game blog of the day. If instead of numbers, you have changed the identifiers of all your photos into words, pick a word or words to use instead, and show us a variety of photos that contain that word in the title.This prompt will repeat each Monday with a new number. If you want to play along, please put a link to your blog in comments below. Here are my contributions to the album.
Click on photos to enlarge and view in gallery..
Click on photos to enlarge.
On a Candlemas Afternoon
Palm shadows of a lazy afternoon
brush over, but do not disturb
the sleeping dog who fills the pavement
in front of “Abarrotes Gloria.”
Under its dusty awning, on a bench
meant for customers notably absent,
a sleep-nodding senora
with small crocheted animals for sale
watches for anyone to stir the calm of this mid-afternoon.
Through one imperceptibly cracked-open eye,
she watches the long-skirted bead vendor
make her hourly crossing from the beach,
her tray still heavy
after five hours of trudging
under the sweating sun,
that eye only opening wider
as two young men on loud motorcycles
circle the plaza in Izod shirts
from the used clothing booth of the mercado,
leaving a tree-shaking breeze
that filters through shadows
to stir the fine hairs on her arm.
for: The W3 Poetry prompt
To see other poems to this prompt go HERE
Trump is part of God’s plan to quell overpopulation of the Earth. They’ll start with liberals, first!
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 