Monthly Archives: October 2025

A Modern Tale, for dVerse Poets

A Modern Tale

Beware the headless horseman. He knows not where he’s going.
For without his brain or senses, he cannot be knowing
north from south or here from there. In fact it’s rather hopeless.
Instead of coping with his journey, he’s completely copeless.

Better to have a head man who hasn’t any horse,
for he can find another vehicle to aid his course
here and there and every where that he seeks to go,
for his brain can lead him, be his progress fast or slow.

Headless horsemen are, I fear, mostly made-up tales,
like the  one by Washington Irving, which, I admit, pales
compared to the real-life tale of that living gent
who is a headless horseman and sadly, our president!!!

The dVerse Poets prompt is to write a poem about a headless horseman.

Advice to Folks in High Places for the 3 Things Challenge

Advice to Folks in High Places

Of course, coarse words might prove a curse,
but words that weave a lie are worse.
So don’t use utterances truthless
as terrifying as they’re ruthless.

The Three Things Challenge asked us to include three words: COURSE COARSE CURSE

Crocs, Iguanas and Relatives for RDP

Click on photos to enlarge and read captions.

The Ragtag Daily Prompt is Reptilian

These are all reptiles I either visited in La Manzanilla  (where some of them visited me) or found in my garden. Luckily, the larger ones I left behind when I came back home to San Juan Cosala!!! Oh, and you may have detected that a couple of them are artistic renderings.

The Numbers Game #94. Please Play Along! Oct 13, 2025

Welcome to “The Numbers Game #94”. Today’s number is 216. 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 titleThis 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.***

Oct 12, 2025, San Juan Cosala Malecon

The water in the lake is up at its highest level again and I went down to check it out. Obvioously, the kids were taking full advantage of the water level!!!

Click on photos to enlarge.

Restaurant Rooster, for Cellpic Sunday

Luckily, I hadn’t ordered the chicken the day this fellow decided to cruise through the restaurant.

For Cellpic Sunday

Dream Diary for The Sunday Whirl

 

Dream Diary

Tattered strips of memory are so easily forgotten,
be they draped in velvet or wound in filmy cotton.
Yet moments revealed in our dreams may spin us back in time
to an earlier period when we were in our prime.
The sound track of our dreaming, be it jazz or rock or rap
be it lullaby or roar, may serve us as a map
putting us in touch with times we’ve chosen to forget—
showing just the tip of an iceberg we’d regret
to see the submerged truth of, preferring to recall
just what we have chosen, not remembering it all.

 

 

Words for the Sunday Whirl are: draped moment velvet reveal tips jazz touch back roar filmy strips forgotten

“Dreamy” for Lens Artists Challenge

Click on Photos to Enlarge.

The Lens Artists Challenge  prompt for this week is “Dreamy” (The illustrations are from my  book Sunup Sundown Song.)

A&Wesome Burgers for the Ragtag Daily Prompt “Sandwich” Prompt

Okay, when I saw the Ragtag prompt was “sandwich,” I decided I simply must rerun this post from 2016:

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Today dawned rainy and foggy with a prediction it would last all day, so instead of spending five hours on the Cabot Trail before heading southwards for another three hour journey to get my car returned to Hertz by 9 p.m., I decided to head immediately for the airport and my overnight stay at the very classy Alt hotel which is located right at the Halifax airport.  Very handy.  Enroute, I noticed an A&W Drive-in and had to stop. I thought they’d gone out of business years ago but here is proof that they are still alive and thriving in Nova Scotia. Thanks, WordPress, for the very timely prompt.  I didn’t even know what it was until I got to the wifi of my hotel in Halifax. Nice coincidence that I was already supplied with an illustration for today’s prompt of “Sandwich!”

Version 3

A&Wsome Burgers

The first drive-in I went to when I was just a kid
(before there was McDonalds or wax cups with a lid)
was an A&W sixty miles from home
with root beer served in frosty mugs and sporting heads of foam.
I haven’t seen another for years, so I believed
there weren’t any anymore—a fact that I have grieved.
So while driving into Halifax, imagine my elation
when I saw an A&W next to a filling station!

I had meant to fill my rental car before I turned it in,
‘cause the prices when Hertz fills them up are really quite a sin,
but all thoughts of filling up the car vanished in a blink
with thoughts of luscious burgers and foamy things to drink.
There’s mama burger, papa burger and even a teen,
but still no baby burgers, or anything between.
They have onion rings and French fries and something called poutine?
An addition to the menu? I found it most obscene.

Now it has been a long time since I have had the fun
of consuming family members stuffed into a bun,
but I am really very sure that poutine is a new one.
In all my life I’ve never before had the chance to chew one!
I asked the friendly sales girl for a bit of erudition
that could clue me in to this Canadian addition
to what I thought was sacrosanct—an act of pure sedition.
Just what has the world come to when franchises have permission

to add things to the menu? It simply is not right
that they can think up something new for us to bite!!!
She filled me in on what it was and said it was delicious.
French fries, cheese curd, gravy??? A mixture most pernicious.
What good are French fries served with cheese that’s certain to taste boggy,
topped off with gravy that no doubt would make the whole mess soggy?
I bought a teen burger and naked French fries at their best—
then left to eat them in my car—a sure sign of protest.

But in the end my protest was paid most dearly for.
For when I took my food to go, slamming shut the door
and roaring off to eat my food in another place,
I ended up with poutine all over my face.
For I forgot to buy my gas which would have cost a third
of what I had to pay to Hertz—a total most absurd.
Yet even though my protest in my budget put a crimp,
at least I did not stoop to eating French fries that were limp!!!

The prompt for RDP is “Sandwich.”

“Open Invitation” For Reena’s Exploration Challenge #402

Doorways, Passageways, Transitions

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This statement by okcForgottenMan written as a comment to these photographs is so true and so related to these photos of Daniel’s house and place of business that was next to the house I rented in La Manzanilla for a few months each year that I must reproduce it here:

“I marvel at how Mexican businesses (and some homeowners) build doorways so differently from what I know in the U.S., where our doors are rigidly defined, narrow, and usually closed (even if they automatically open). There in Mexico, the doorways to the shops are usually wide enough to drive a car through, and they stay open, inviting, during business hours. They blur the distinction between being in the shop and being just outside. Viva Mexico!”

For Reena’s Exploration Challenge #402 the prompt is: Passages, Doorways, Thresholds, Transitions