This sunny visitor was the single bloom on its bush today. With a beauty like this, one is enough.
“Obelisco” Hibiscus: Flower of the Day, May 20, 2018
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Author Archives: lifelessons
The Advantages of Complication
The Advantages of Complication
We need not suffer tremulation
over each new complication.
Problems can be an education
giving you a short vacation
from life’s boring replication
and furnishing a daily ration
of a brand new excitation.
Even outright consternation
can lead us to boredom’s cessation,
leading us to the elation
of a full heart’s palpitation
that leads to life’s renovation.
The prompt word today is complication.
Zombie Cats at Midnight
Don’t let them in!!!!
Guava Blossom: Flower of the Day, May 19, 2018
I almost missed these little beauties on this volunteer guava tree in my front garden.
Highchair Fashionista
Frock
Enlarge all photos by clicking on any one.
Highchair Fashionista
Her mania for haute couture
came a little premature
when she first crawled across the floor,
wanting to see Grandma’s Dior.
When she took her first steps and fell,
it was reaching for Auntie’s Chanel.
The words she learned at Mama’s knee
were Calvin Klein and Givenchy.
Her alphabet from A to V
(from Armani up to Versace)
she learned in closets of her kin
dreaming of how she’d look in
Louis Vitton, Laurent, Bill Blass.
She’d be the best-dressed in her class
of other girls in cut-off jeans
and dresses made by mere machines.
Thus are fashionistas made.
As other children sell lemonade
or waste their days in hide-and-seek,
they are fingering La Fabrique
and looking at the fold and drape
of a model’s evening cape.
To each their own, we’re given to say,
and yet I’m prone to saying “Nay,
childhood might be better spent
in pastimes of another bent.”
I’d hope that kids from zero to twelve
might be more encouraged to delve
into comics or games or nature
with no stylish nomenclature.
Let kids be freakish, free and nerdy.
Let their clothes get torn and dirty.
Time enough for fashion cults
later, when they’re grown adults.
The prompt today was premature.
Flower’s End (Papaya) Flower of the Day, May 18, 2018
I’ve been resisting posting this photo, which actually isn’t a flower, but the end result of a flower: green papayas and the cut off stems. Still waiting for them to ripen and end up on my breakfast table.
For: Cee’s flower prompt
Rock around the “Ock”
n’ Sock
Click on any photo to enlarge all.
Locks, rocks, docks, clocks (tic tocks) and socks!!!
(Here are a couple of other “ock” posts. Just pretend they are in black and white: )
For: cees-black-white-photo-challenge-words-that-end-in-ock/
Green Brownies
Green Brownies
(This poem evolved from notes that I scribbled into the margin
of our Mexican Train score sheet while visiting my friend Gloria.)
Green Brownies
The brownie that she serves me
crumbles when I try to break it in half.
Her sense of humor allows it and so I tease her.
“Gloria, this looks like the kind of food
my grandmother tried to pawn off on us—
weeks old and crusty from the refrigerator.”
“Those chocolate chips were like that when I bought them!”
she insists, even before I question their green tinge.
I think that this is even worse than the alternative,
and say so and we both laugh as she eats her brownie
and I reduce mine to dust. Not a hard task, as it turns out.
She’s had a bad infection for a week or more.
“I’m not contagious,” she insists each time she coughs
a long low rasping rumble that threatens to avalanche.
“Now stop!” she tells the sounds that explode
without permission from her chest.
“Perhaps,” I say, “These brownies are a godsend
and that’s penicillin growing on the chocolate chips.”
Then her deep coughs transform into
gasps of laughter that echo mine.
The young man there to rake the garden
looks up at us and shakes his head
at two old ladies drinking rum and
eating something chocolate,
and it occurs to me that perhaps
what the world sees as senility
is simply evolution
out of adulthood
to a higher
stage.
Are you feeling a sense of deja vu? This is a reblog of a piece I wrote four years ago. The WordPress prompt word today was infect.
Bougainvillea Still Life: Flower of the Day, May 17, 2018
Loud Music in the Rainy Season
Click on any photo to enlarge all.
Loud Music in the Rainy Season
Up above me, such a din!
I feel my patience growing thin.
Cross fingers that they do not fall
as workmen scamper over all,
balancing on domes and peaks,
replacing roof tiles, sealing leaks.
They’re taking the old surface off
all my domes and drainage trough,
putting membrane down and goo
that will not let the water through
in June when rains beat hard and steady,
although, alas, they’ve come already!
The dogs are sent into a tizzy.
Looking up, I just get dizzy.
In this world that I love so,
down here in lovely Mexico,
now the grinder joins the din.
In a noise Olympics, it would win!
My thoughts all center on escaping
this chipping, drilling, pounding, scraping.
How I’d like to leave this all
for relative quiet at the mall!
But, alas, I must remain
a martyr to construction pain.
Ear plugs having no effect,
before my sanity is wrecked,
I turn up music to a SHOUT
to let Bob Dylan drown them out.
Now Caitlin Cary croons and sings
that she is “Sorry” and other things.
Eliza Gilkyson’s rough croon
is over oh too soon, too soon.
The silence that her true love speaks
replaced now by the sander’s shrieks,
I turn the iPod on again,
full force, to drown out all the din.
I’ve no sympathy for the neighbors’ plight.
Their damn dog kept me up all night,
and if my eardrums are to be shot
I would rather that it’s not
by machines like those above,
but rather by a sound I love.
The prompt word today is “thin.”
