Author Archives: lifelessons

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About lifelessons

My blog, which started out to be about overcoming grief, quickly grew into a blog about celebrating life. I post daily: poems, photographs, essays or stories. I've lived in countries all around the globe but have finally come to rest in Mexico, where I've lived since 2001. My books may be found on Amazon in Kindle and print format, my art in local Ajijic galleries. Hope to see you at my blog.

Bar Stool Bozos and the Predictable Come-on Line

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Bar Stool Bozos and the Predictable Come-on Line

A new potential conquest is seen falling from her stool
in bodily protection from contact with this fool.
He’s a denizen of single bars, a problem to avoid,
for he’s sure to leave you listless, if not, in fact, annoyed.

How many boring platitudes can one bromide spout?
How may time-worn come-on lines are vying to get out
of lips that move unceasingly, spilling into the night
all the obvious clichés that he’s driven to cite?

Of all the gin joints in the world, why did he enter in
into the one where you came to have a quiet gin?
There should be a law passed that you get to vote on who
gets to wander into bars and saunter up to you.

They should have to pass an I.Q. test, then be sorted and tagged,
from “interesting” to “boring,” and the worst should then be gagged
with a small hole for a soda straw so they could go on drinking
without the ones around them having to know what they’re thinking.

 

Notable come-on lines that are grounds for gagging:

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
“If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?”
“We gotta get you outa that wet dress and into a dry martini.”

 

Prompt words today are bromide, falling, denizen and problem.

Note: Bromide in literary usage means a phrase, cliché, or platitude that is trite or unoriginal. It can be intended to soothe or placate; it can suggest insincerity or a lack of originality in the speaker. Bromide can also mean a commonplace or tiresome person, a bore (a person who speaks in bromides).

Solitary Interlude

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Solitary Interlude

The luxury of time alone.
No lapses for which to atone.
No tasks assigned. No obligations.
Only personal tribulations.
No one to answer to or for.
A bolted gate. A locked front door.
No need to dress or comb my hair.
Leaving my room, no one is there.

Company is glorious,
but, alas, laborious.
The same is true of visiting.
A bird that’s always on the wing
has no time to enjoy her nest.
I leave it up to you what’s best—
company or solitude?
Activity or quietude?

I am no hermit. I crave no den.
I love the places where I’ve been.
A bit of each is what I’d choose.
Sometimes one and sometimes twos.
But as for now, I must declare,
my guest room empty with no one there
gives me the perfect company:
one-on-one, myself and me.

Eulogy for Artichokes

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Eulogy for Artichokes

Behold the bristly artichokes scattered through the field—
delicious little thistles when boiled, buttered, peeled.
With our taste buds wakened and when they’re salted slightly,
it takes a bit of discipline to try to eat politely.

Leaf by leaf, we peel them bare, scraping off their meat.
We like them better with each tiny bit of them we eat.
Then scraping off the “chokey” part, we gobble down the heart.
They told us all along that this would be our favorite part.

Who knew these fat green pinecones would turn out to be so tasty?
Now we wish consumption of them hadn’t been so hasty.
And even after plates are bare and not a morsel lingers,
we’d like to slurp the butter up and lick it from our fingers.

 

Prompts for the day are scattered, field, discipline, bristly and wake. Image by Margaret Jaszowski on Unsplash.

Stages, FOTD Aug 28, 2021

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Click on photos to enlarge.

For Cee’s FOTD

Hibiscus, Aug 28, 2021

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This brand new hibiscus was at the height of its beauty today. It seems to float above the brick pathway of the garden.

 

For Cee’s FOTD

Ruffled Hibiscus, FOTD Aug 27, 2021

2 Replies

 

For Cee’s FOTD

The Watchers

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The Watchers

Is deja vu imagined or is it re-dreamed dreams—
time as we have lived it leaking at the seams?
Perhaps time is a magnet that draws in all our years
like a solar plexus for all our hopes and fears.

Perhaps it teams together with the universe
presenting itself over so we can rehearse
the choices that we’re given and choose a different course—
one that fate rebels against, another to endorse.

The chance of this may stupefy, for man in his confusion
is prone to make a science out of his delusion.
But forces we know little of perhaps control it all.
They have us in their balance, weighing out our fall.

Prompts for today are deja vu, magnet, stupify, plexus and force.

 

An Avid Fetcher’s Soliloquy

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My house’s front door.

Click on photos to enlarge.

An Avid Fetcher’s Soliloquy

Whose house this is I so well know.
She’s swinging in the hammock, though.
I think she came to catch some zzzs,
not for a Scottie on her knees,
but still, I charm her with my eyes
and my bigger brother vies

to win attention and her pats,
but I want something else, and that’s
a tennis ball thrown just for me.
I drop it now beside her knee.
She reaches out and throws it up
and I’m a very happy pup

as I race to go retrieve it
knowing that she will receive it
once again, and then again,
for that’s the way it’s always been
ever since I can remember,
mom compliant, me so limber

that sometimes I catch that round
ball before it hits the ground.
and though her left arm’s occupied
with scratching Diego’s tough hide,
her right arm is my provenance,
and so I bark and jump and dance,

encouraging throw after throw
so I can follow where they go,
and when at night I go to sleep,
upon my dog bed, burrowing deep,
I pray the God of dogs protects
mom’s throwing arm from all defects.

For dVerse poets, the prompt is to write a soliloquy.

I wrote this one on International Dogs Day, Aug 16, 2021.
Thanks to Victoria Slotto for pointing that out to me.

FOTD Aug 26, 2021

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For Cee’s FOTD

The Human Race

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The Human Race

Our world keeps tripping over its own tangled shoelaces,
one generation tying them up, the next heedlessly
rushing ahead in wondrous greed until it trips, falls,
and stops again to tighten its laces.

Today goes for the throat of yesterday,
bemoaning its tardiness
in choking off the past
while rushing ahead in a blind race.

In a constant state of pregnancy,
one generation gives birth to the next,
standing and tripping and falling in turn
like an automaton marching ahead to its own destruction.

Prompt words are throat, tangled shoelaces, wondrous, tardy and pregnancy.