Category Archives: advice

Your Life’s a Journey: Wordle 510, July 18, 2021

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Your Life’s a Journey

If you feel that life’s a game—
pictures leaping from the frame, 
its lyrics just a canned refrain,
events linked like a preformed chain.

If what you do seems like a dream,
your actions not what they may seem.
If you find yourself receding
where you’d prefer that you were leading.

If you’re forced into a space
where you seem to vanish without a trace,
just reach out and touch the screen.
Apply your shoulder. Push and lean.

Break out from where you feel you’re trapped.
Rip up the course that fate has mapped.
Shed its pattern. Jump off its shelf.
Live a life you’ve planned yourself.

Your life’s a journey you’re mean to plan
and if you try, I know you can.
Walk the road of your own choosing.
Any other way is losing.

Prompt words for Wordle this week are: chain, lean, game, screen, seem, recede, space, frame, dream, lead, shed, refrain.

First to the Gate

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First to the Gate

If you were born to innovate,
your one desire to create,
take care you don’t equivocate,
for if you do, I fear your fate
will be that you react too late.
Someone will beat you to the plate!
So if you don’t desire this fate,
Act boldly, friend, and do not wait!!!

The Daily Addictions prompt is innovate.

Black as His Soul

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“A black object is black because it’s absorbing all the light; it’s not reflecting any color.”

Black as His Soul

Black as the soul of POTUS, dark as Beelzebub.
As sable as the darkest night, tarred as an axle hub.
It does not serve you well, my dear, to fall in love with black.
It draws your whole light into it and gives you nothing back.
Black will draw and quarter you, stretch you on the rack.
It is the shade of Mack the Knife, a ripper known as Jack.
There’s no good connotation for this tone of night.
You simply cannot find one—try howe’er you might.
Black robs you of your light and keeps it as its own.
It is a cruel jailer, sitting on its thrown.
Who would guess so many could be so misguided
as to elect a president who is so ill-betided?
What an ugly irony that he who decries colored skin
should have a soul whose pigment takes all color in.
No matter how you’re drawn to it, please take a different tack,
for no matter what you do, black doesn’t love you back.

The prompt today is black.

Outspoken

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Outspoken

When you tell your truths en masse,
what you may choose to see as brass
others might perceive as crass.
You may think you’re just a truthful lassie,
but what to you is cute and sassy,
the rest of us consider gassy!
Sometimes, just let the impulse pass.
You’ll be less of a horse’s ass!

 

 

The prompt word today was “brassy.”

Rose

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Rose

We are all filters of the world,
taking the news in—the happy births 
and inane deaths, the charities and cruelties,
the beauties and the gross ugliness
of nature and of human nature. 
These things pass through us or get stuck,
taking us with them into the poles of our own natures.
Those ills of the world we choose to dwell on
change us if we are not careful to let them go again
or to act in a manner opposite—
which causes us to seed new hope
which just might, just might
catch hold in the sieves
of others
and bloom.

A concrete poem is one that takes the form of what it describes. I could find no photo of a rose in my photo library, so the form of the poem will have to do to illustrate its meaning. 

The prompt today was “filter.”

On the Stump

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On the Stump

Hobbling around on the stump of a life,
nobody’s lover and nobody’s wife,
her children and grandchildren all raised and grown,
out of her life and out on their own.

Is her life over? Is it near its ending,
or has she another life that is just pending?
Has she a talent for regeneration?
Is the first sixty years mere education?

A single shoe dropped is only one shoe.
Life isn’t over until it is through.
Perhaps she’s less active removed from the past,
but wind can still fill out a sail at half mast.

The stub of a life can still get us around.
A heart can still beat and the blood can still pound.
Go after adventure for all you are worth,
for every new day is a part of your birth.

 

The prompt word today was “stump,” and I must admit it nearly stumped me. Lately my poems have degenerated into moralistic little lesson-rhymes. I may seem to be up on the stump, but it it is not my intention to preach as it is mainly myself I’m trying to advise. If you want to listen in, you are most welcome.

 

 

 

Leapin’ Lizards

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Leapin’Lizards

Iguanas, lizards, gekkos, turtles, toads and frogs and snakes
are not the things that we should fear in life, for goodness sakes.
These creatures in their own domains present no awful threat.
Just leave them where they are, for none were made to be a pet.

Our tame lives seek to steal the wildness from such natural things,
but wildness is not what curtailing wildness ever  brings.
We must learn to leap ourselves––by entering our lives
and breaking free from prisons–our cages, pens or hives––

to buzz the world around us and see what we can find
to release us from our lethargy and the ties that bind.
If you do not know the way, just go and find a child
and follow him or her to places where they keep the wild.

The beach or any sandpile may serve to be your clues
of how to color your own life with more vivid hues.
A thing as simple as wet sand can take a child to
places where you had forgot you could be taken to.

Castle moats or rivers, dams, mountain tops or caves
huge mansions that are sacrifices to that evening’s waves.
Our wild imaginations are where we all should go
to find a little wildness when our lives are slow.

Go find a dog to walk with if you need a pet
then take him out to some wild beach–and both of you, get wet!
Wildness is for doing, not for sitting on a shelf.
So free the creatures pining there and find some for yourself!

(Click on first photo to enlarge and view gallery)


Those baby sea turtles are being set free, not being collected. Happy Leap Year!!!
(If you want to know more about the release of the baby turtles, go HERE.)

This poem was written partially in response to this strange strange news from my home town that was sent to me by two friends yesterday. Read about it here:  http://www.chapala.com/webboard/index.php?/topic/60430-tiger-in-la-floresta/

It was also in response to the prompt “Leap,” in honor of this being the extra day in this leap year!  https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/leap/

Finding a Path

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 Finding a Path

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The Prompt: Alma Mater—You’ve been asked to speak at your high school alma mater— about the path of life. (Draft the speech.

I wrote a poem last year that suits gives any further advice I’d give a young person.  You can find it HERE.

 

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/alma-mater/

In the Soup

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In the Soup

Definition: in trouble, as in “I’m in the soup with the boss.”

Without fear, we’d be in traction with braces head to toe––
Each day a speed infraction from refusing to go slow.
We’d fall off tipping ladders and land upon our heads,
or go to sleep with adders sleeping in our beds.

We wouldn’t have good sense about where we should go.
I fear we would be dense––our thought processes slow.
We’d wind up in the jungle sleeping on the ground
hoping for each bungle a solution might be found.

Since fiction often follows fact, I’ve been in many a stew.
But luckily, I chose to act, so “done to” turned to “do.”
In the past I came too near to kidnapping and rape,
and luckily by conquering fear, I’d find means of escape.

After graduating college, I became a bum;
but now I can acknowledge that I was often dumb.
Fearlessness was often what got me into trouble.
My mind would choose to soften the rub of danger’s stubble.

Traveling a foreign region, I was so naive
that my mistakes were legion, so now I do believe
it’s crazy to be fearless. Now even I succumb.
In caution I am peerless––finding fearlessness is dumb!

The Prompt: Fearless Fantasies––How would your world be different if you were incapable of feeling fear?

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/fearless-fantasies/

 At Fourteen

There is a whole world out there and you’ll see it soon enough.
It is the world inside of you you’ll find especially rough.
Try to write about it, and try to tell the truth
about the things that happen that you find uncouth.

Write about what hurts you, and hurts that you have done–
all those shadows in you brought into the sun.
Ask those around you why they act in ways that might seem cruel
and try to live your own life by the golden rule.

Take chances and do not be cowed when you achieve less
than what you might have hoped for, and when you’re wrong, confess.
Don’t just do what your friends do. Don’t act before you think.
However strange the ones around you, try to find a link.

The world has enough meanness. Try not to add to it.
Try harder in environments where you seem not to fit.
People who are petty will cut you like a knife,
but the chances that you take will be what will make your life.

Other people’s rules pinch like a too-small shoe,
so don’t let other people dictate what you do.
Do not fear to step aside and go out on your own.
The fields that yield the sweetest crop are those that you have sown.

Post this advice up on your wall and read it now and then.
Use it as a means to reassess where you have been.
Then when you are older, and your life grows thin,
do what I am doing now. Consider it again.

 

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “From You to You.” Write a letter to your 14-year-old self. Tomorrow, write a letter to yourself in 20 years.