Halloween Tales
Halloween love stories are not so very thrillin,’
for it’s not romantic to hook up with a villain.
Monsters, ogres, ghosts and goblins don’t excel at lovin’.
Nor do witches have much use for it within their coven.
And so you’ll find that Halloween tells a different story
still filled with thrills that are more gruesome and more gory.
Prompts for the Three Things Challenge are: Monster, Ogre and Villain
Welcome to “The Numbers Game #96”. Today’s number is 218. To play along, go to your photos file folder 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 as Gallery.***
Click on photos below to increase size.
The hurricanes that cause devastation on the coast merely whip our palms, turn off electricity and knock down tree limbs, but more often, the wind is our friend. It swells our sails, keeps flags, balloons and birds aloft and furnishes the electricity that it sometimes, in its excesses, switches off again.
Hurricane or breeze,
the wind does what it pleases—
both our friend and foe.
Rebecca’s Poetry Challenge, we are to write a Haibun on the subject of wind.
Click on Photos to Enlarge!
What Would We Do Without Friends?
*From my neighbor Sergio, who interprets confusing Spanish messages from my insurance company for me and
*David (peeking out the door) who along with Sergio shares his latest culinary triumphs with me via care packages sent over from next door,
*to Pepe who has been coming by weekly for 11 or more years to give me a massage,
*to Brad and Eddie who came to cook me a delicious breakfast a few days ago,
*to my friend Blue who spent the afternoon driving me around on errands yesterday as I am carless while the insurance company holds my car hostage in Guadalajara.,
*to Doug (Forgottenman) who has been sending me links all week long (including this one) to remind me to post to them—
my past week has been filled with the blessings of favors done by friends. Bless them!!!
See Johnbo’s Cellpic Sunday HERE.
Tick-Tock
Back when there was magic,
before the world was broken,
in my childhood’s comfy nest,
the major language spoken
is remembered as a ghost of words
blown in on a breeze.
Life was one great treasure,
set out for us to seize.
The last war newly over,
the news of the time
seemed to tell of happenings
peaceful and benign.
No need for bomb shelters
or ICE or interventions.
My childhood passed most peacefully,
mainly free of tensions.
Time seemed to drag on slowly
from birthday to Halloween.
There seemed to be a hundred years
between toddler and teen.
But now that I am 78, life whizzes by as though
it’s making up for all those years when it passed by so slow.
And peace that in my innocence I thought would always last
has become just a memory of an idyllic past.
for The Sunday Whirl 729 the prompt words are: magic back broken nest seems drag news breeze life ghost need tell
A Jailed Jiminy
The task for Fibbing Friday this week is to define:
1. Ripsnorter: A surfer joke.
2. Rinky-dink: A very small skating arena
3. Rapscallion: A green onion served in a buffet at the end of filming.
4. Recalcitrant: Describing someone about to go back onto their diet.
5. Rickrack: Lucillle Ball’s bosom.
6. Rut-roh: Slang for Canoeing the Colorado River
7. Redonkulous: A scarlet buttercup
8. Rammy: Da da’s Mama
9. Rickety-crickety: A decaying zoo enclosure for insects
10. Roodle: A tasteless piece of pasta
President Trump’s demolition of the East Wing has struck a nerve in Washington and beyond.
Wednesday was breezy, bright and autumnal in Washington — the perfect backdrop for a stroll to the White House to watch the swift demolition of the East Wing.
I heard it before I saw it: the thrum of construction equipment and a loud rat-tat-tat that could have been digging or drilling. As I weaved through a group of schoolchildren posing for photographs in front of the main residence, I could see the arms of two excavators bobbing around, too tall to be hidden by the thick white fence erected around the fresh construction site. Behind them, a cloud of dust obscured the clear air.
It wasn’t so long ago that Trump was promising his plan to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the grounds “won’t interfere with the current building.” In fact, my colleague Luke Broadwater reported today that the entire wing, which is historically the domain of the first lady, will be razed in the project, and the price tag would increase to $300 million, $100 million more than initially estimated.
Images of the demolition, which began on Monday, have rocketed around the globe, swiftly becoming political fodder and a perfect Rorschach test for a deeply polarizing presidency.
“This is Trump’s presidency in a single photo,” wrote Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, on X, above a picture showing roof tiles and windowpanes cascading from the facade of the wing, having fallen victim to the excavators’ jaws. “Illegal, destructive, and not helping you.”
The project has left historians and architects deeply alarmed. The National Trust for Historic Preservation on Wednesday urged officials to pause until it could go through the “legally required public review process.” Last week, Trump seemed to suggest to donors that “no approvals” were required for the project.
Trump’s allies insist that the images show a president shaking up Washington, just like he promised. In a sign of awareness that they could not entirely ignore the criticism of the project, though, administration officials called the uproar “manufactured outrage” in a release that detailed other renovations on the building over the years.
“He’s the builder-in-chief,” the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said brightly on Fox News on Tuesday. “In large part, he was re-elected back to this People’s House because he is good at building things.”
Trump, ever the developer, has certainly spent a lot of time building things at the White House. He paved over the lawn in the Rose Garden to create a patio. He has added gold filigree to the Oval Office and ornate chandeliers to the Cabinet Room, remaking the White House with an indelible imprint of Mar-a-Lago maximalism that is all but certain to outlast his presidency.
Image
78
Skinny arms,
too thin to fill the skin out.
Tiny empty rivers,
terminally dry.
When did they
carve their courses
through these arms
once anxious
to lose baby fat,
now
nostalgic
for their lost
opposites?
After reading this poem, Forgottenman sent me the below poem, which he wrote years ago. It is such a perfect answer to my above poem that I have to share it with you here. It is my favorite of many things he has written in the past.
She Calls Herself a Spinster
She calls herself a spinster with a sly and sultry smile.
At seventy-eight, she knows so well the art of luring guile.
A silken string strewn on his face from her outstretched bony hand
is not seen by the younger man she knows that she will land.
This young man is manly, which must lead to his demise.
A spinster spider knows too much and casts her come-on lies.
She twirls him round and round and round and round again once more.
He’s dizzy now and lustful. She has him to his core.
He’s bound up in her silken web, her web of love’s deceit.
Her sweet perfume, her purring tongue, the web of his defeat.
At his last gasp engulfed in thread, he knows that he’s been had.
But he would not trade in his fate. His last breaths are not sad.
She’s energized, another score! And she dabs on more perfume.
The darkness that she penetrates, it leads to weak men’s doom.
She calls herself a spinster with a sly and sultry smile.
At seventy-nine, she knows so well the art of luring guile.
Spider
If it’s April, it must be:
Hello, NaPoWriMo
Good morning, NaPoWriMo, and good night.
Whether I have written or will write,
you tend to fill my day with obligation
for rhymed and metered concentration.
Social engagements––a thing of the past.
No time for conversation and repast
except for sandwiches and coffee quickly quaffed
in glow not candlelight (but just as soft)
that shines from my computer screen
from morn till night, with no relief between
as I strain for yet another rhyme.
For this is how I spend my time,
NaPoWriMo! With fourteen days to go,
it is impossible to just say, “No.”
No matter how I yearn to just resume my life––
to end these rhymes with which my days are rife––
I have to finish what I started
lest I be branded fickle-hearted.
I read somewhere that half the poets who first committed
to write a poem a day have by now quitted
the task they took an oath to do;
but still a few
plod on with me. We’ll never meet,
though we walk down the same blank path with metered feet.
Perhaps one day we’ll meet in poetry heaven or hell
knowing we did this task completely if not well!
In conclusion, I have heard
That in Hawaii, there’s one word
that means both hello and good bye.
It means love, affection, adios and hi!
That word, “Aloha,” covers all from dark to light;
and so, Aloha, NaPoWriMo, and good night!
For dVerse Poets, the prompt is “Make up your own name for a micro season.”
Welcome to “The Numbers Game #95”. Today’s number is 217. To play along, go to your photos file folder 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 as Gallery.***
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 