Birth of a Couch Potato
The crush of humanity, swell of the crowd,
demands a new edict. No pushing allowed.
Thus turning the scene a tad melancholy,
whereas in the past it had been pretty jolly.
The policy depended, primarily, on shaming
certain well-known revelers I won’t be naming,
by branding them careless , ill-mannered and rude
and other crass labels that I won’t include.
Suffice it to say that this official labeling
contributed much to their social disabling.
Now they sit home getting flaccid and flabby,
watching old episodes of Downton Abbey.
.
Prompts for today are crush, swell, shaming, flabby, policy and melancholy .
Image by Eric Mclean on Unsplash
I received this email today. If meant as a joke, not the least bit funny. If not a joke, scary as Hell: 
I received this in an email. How can it even be legal to put such a threatening message on the Internet? SICK SICK SICK!!!!!
![]](https://i0.wp.com/judydykstrabrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_7949.jpg?w=204&h=153&ssl=1 "IMG_7949")
Fact to Fiction: The Storyteller
If I must explain the robbery of my peace of mind,
I’ll plaster on a smile and see if I can find
languor of mind to do so in a manner so compelling
that you’ll never feel the horror I experience in its telling.
The unity we come to as I come to a conclusion
is a little fantasy created by the fusion
of truth and storytelling, for I never fail
to weave a pretty story out of a horrid tale.
Prompt words today are explain, robbery, unity, conclusion languor and plaster.
Future Shock
On our way to maturation, when we’re adult-bound,
childhood’s denizens are most likely to astound.
Expressing new insights, they make statements bound to shock
that upon close scrutiny, their elders choose to mock.
Patterns of behavior that they, too, exhibited,
glorying in actions their elders once prohibited.
Thus does every generation choose to shock the last
as their predecessors fade into the past.
Time is a marsh that buries memories of old
as each new wave of humans discovers acts more bold.
Prompt words today are patterns, insight, scrutiny, marsh, childhood. Images by Tamara Bellis and Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash.
For Cee’s FOTD
Tourist Trap
“Any gremlins hereabout?” a tiny woman queried,
inspecting piles of autumn leaves for any bodies buried.
I’d feared she was a tenderfoot when she had signed up
for this Halloween adventure, but I evilly quipped, “Yup.”
Every freckle popped out as her face blanched to pure white
and her muscles tensed up to prepare for fight or flight.
She surveyed every shadow on the path that led us up
to the haunted mansion where the group of us would sup.
The scene was dark and moonlit and the shadows all reached out.
A most effective scary atmosphere, without a doubt.
The spooky creaking of the door as we reached the house
was echoed by the squeaking of every resident mouse.
The furniture was draped with ghostly sheets covered with dust,
and every metal object wore a crumbling scab of rust.
Eerie portraits on the wall. Thick drapery that soon
we’d draw back so the diners could view a harvest moon
as they supped on boiling cauldrons of steaming witches’ stew
and rich red wine in lieu of blood would simply have to do.
What is it about Halloween that makes folks crave a scare
so much that they would pay us to bring them to this lair?
Mortals are so gullible, and now the time draws near
when they’ll become the spirits who’ll conduct the tour next year!
Prompts today are tenderfoot, scene, gremlin, hereabouts, freckle and furniture. The photo is of the Lord Crewe Arms in Scotland, an abbey built in the 12th century and later turned into a hotel. My mother and I slept in its haunted room overlooking the graveyard in 1985. If you want to hear what happened, go HERE.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 