Party House
I can’t take the pressure of frivolous neighbors.
Their loud celebrations conflict with my labors.
Their barbecue odors disturb my frail nose.
They turn up the music when I want to doze.
Convivial people are really a pain.
Of my existence, they’re really the bane.
I wish I could trade them for sedater folks
who had quieter music and told fewer jokes,
for the laughter I hear is pure noise pollution.
I wish I could think of a better solution:
a wall or a device to filter the sound,
but instead I must phone or cry out or pound
on the door that no one inside ever hears.
They just do not care, or so it appears.
I complain to the neighborhood association
that sends them a warning to curb their elation,
but somehow the party just starts up again.
More laughter, more music, more odors, more din.
If only they knew that there’s no need to fight me.
I’d overlook all if they’d only invite me!
Prompt words today are can’t, pressure, frivolous, convivial and nose.
Don’t you just LOVE typing 2020? I am hooked on it. Humans have not had that experience for 101 years–since 1919, and there is something much more satisfying in typing 2020. In 2012, the United Nations estimated that there were 316,600 living centenarians worldwide, so there may be 300,000 people worldwide who twice in their life would have been able to write twin double digits for the date, but how likely is it that they would have typed it? The first typewriter was invented in 1867 and came into wide usage in offices in the mid-1880’s, but I doubt that anyone younger than 10 would have been using a typewriter, so that means they would have to be 111 this year to have possibly typed both 1919 and 2020 as dates on a typewriter. There are 86 people in the world 111 years old or older, but no one has had the foresight to ask them all if they had access to a typewriter in 1919, let alone even once typed that date. Am I obsessing? No. Just enjoying this nicely-rounded-out year!!!! (Don’t miss out on the thrill on Feb. 2 of typing 0202 2020.)
Does anyone else feel the same joy in typing 2020 2020 2020???
If so, please confess to it in comments.
For Cee’s FOTD
For Cee’s Flower of the Day prompt.
Once by Ice and Once by Fire
Once by ice and now by fire, erasing her mistakes,
Mother Earth must wonder how many times it takes
to finally get the world planned right, for once the lot is cast,
how can she watch sufficiently a planet that’s so vast?
Her hope is that but rarely she must resort to extinction
to control a species risen to such great distinction
that it uses up more resources than it can provide.
How many times must she restore a planet that has died?
She casts a might yawn and then breathes fire once again—
cancelling out excesses that they can’t see as sin.
Caught in a clinch as they resist all means of education,
perhaps the only answer is mankind’s eradication.
Prompt words today are extinct, rarely, clinch, vast and hope.
Dreams
My dreams always end before some big climax—the revelation of what is behind the wall or who is behind the spread cape, ready to turn around and solve the mystery. Dreams are a wonderland we dive into unaware—a little surprise some part of us produces every night. A vast world composed of images real and false. Bits from our past or present scrambled up with fantastic elements perhaps remembered from our youth. Dreams where we can fly. Sinister alleys and unknown streets we wander through, at first with a false assurance that they will lead to somewhere. It is with regrets or a heartfelt “hurray!” that we awaken from these dreams—either saved or disappointed by the awakening—our lives somehow sorted out by the weird realignment of facts and fantasy that they accomplish, like shuffled cards, rearranging our past by mixing it in with the future or with fantasy. Dreams are a surreal world we enter every night, no less real than the world we live in every day. Just different, made up of different parts of ourselves. A second chance, perhaps. Or a sorting out of problems, worries, regrets.
Prompts today are dive, wonderland, false, hurray, vast.
Hard Knocks
That first triumphant journey of a toddler on a trike
predicts his future conquering of a two-wheel bike.
Despite his mom’s temptation to grab his overalls
to whisk him off from crisis and save him from his falls,
nothing can be gained from this. He needs to face his spills.
Part of education is dealing with the ills
that he’ll be called upon to deal with in his future life.
We cannot live our children’s lives or guarantee no strife.
Prompt words today are nothing, crisis, temptation, triumph and bike.
