For The Friday Reminder, the prompt is “Jelly.” This should be fun…
A Jellybelly Insight
What feels special in my belly?
Ice cream, peanut butter, jelly,
Scotchbread cookies, pecan pie
and all the chocolate I can buy.
Thus said, I bet that you can tell
my tummy’s padded pretty well.
And since my jeans I can’t fit into,
it’s salad I should have bit into.
Yikes! is that a scorpion? Actually, this is a bottle of mescal my student Eduardo gave me last year for my birthday. Inside were three giant scorpions and a coral snake. So far everyone who has visited me has given it a miss, as have I. It is rumored that a sip of it will bolster a man’s virility.
Creature Discomforts
Lest you suffer a hot foot in the darkness of the night
as you journey to the bathroom and feel a sting or bite,
best slip into your shoes first before you journey there
lest a scorpion or spider gives a wound that you can’t bear.
Then in the brightness of the day, out in the prairie grass,
God grant that you’re not bitten in the ankle or the ass
by a coral snake who wounds you and is off, then, in a shot,
leaving you with ashen face, intestines in a knot.
Wishing you were dead, perhaps, instead of in such pain
that you vow that you will never walk in waist-high grass again
lest it lead to the resurgence of encounters with that snake
who surely you could fight off with a pistol or a rake
Better that you face it in bottle of mescal
than bushwhacking through the grasslands or walking down the hall.
if only you had seen it, but now that subject’s moot.
If you ever walk this way again, you’ll bring a gun–and shoot!
The words for Sunday Whirl this week are: shot foot dark bright prairie grass hot ash dead resurgence fight god
Empty Nest
I’ve been missing
that half-grown kissing
that lasts a minute
with chocolate in it.
Runny noses.
Heads of roses
picked off stems
like rarest gems
presented in
a tuna tin.
Priceless treasure
for my pleasure.
My life lacks
these loving smacks––
even a quickie,
albeit sticky
with peanut butter.
A parting stutter,
and then they’re gone
and off upon
contrivences new,
away from you,
taking their kisses
to other misses.
For Fandango’s FOWC the prompt is “Contrived.”
The Assignment for Fibbing Friday today is: Below are 10 titles and authors, all of which are fictitious. This week I’m asking you to do a cover blurb in a few sentences or perhaps have an idea for a sequel.
1. The Missing Tent by Seymour Skye: An expose of why touring circuses are a thing of the past.
2. Making the Most of Bread by Roland Pickles: A misprint of the actual book Making the Host of Bread, which is a guide for the preparation of Protestant holy communion.
3. Living on a Budget by M T Wallit: The author’s name is a pseudonym. This is actually the title of a tongue-in-cheek book by Donald Trump.
4. Wake me at Dawn by Misty Mawning: A book ghost-written by someone pretending to be the corpse at a funeral Wake.
5. Sing me a Lullaby by Muse Ickles: Advice for a new mother, written as though reading the mind of a screaming baby at 3 A.M.
6. Caught in the Act by Robin Banks: Pseudonym for the real author, Donald Trump, who will as usual escape unprosecuted and unpunished.
7. The Pensioner Chronicles by Jerry Attrick: Biography of Leonardo da Vinci, so named because Leonardo’s journals contain drawings with cross-sections of what appears to be a reservoir pen that works by both gravity and capillary action.
8. The Scapegoat’s Revenge by Carrie deCan: Leon Trotsky’s pseudonym for his autobiography that revealed Stalin’s vile scheme to blame him for soviet economic failures and military disasters,
9. Fields of Destiny by Krystal Ball: Biography of popular twenty-first century singing group “Destiny’s Child.”
10. The Long and the Short of It by Cyn Opsiss. Again, a pseudonym used for a sex guide written by Donald Trump. Only half fiction.
This is today’s look over the shoulder from Word Press: “Cracking open the content time capsule: Revisit your posts from this day, June 26.”
I chose a post I made on this date (June 26) in 2016:
I agree that “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, ” but fences, schmences. Although the topic today is “Fences,” I think walls are close enough to fences–just a matter of material and “I have miles to go before I sleep” thanks to packing, purchasing, organizing and copying things I need to take to the states on Wednesday, so taking the further risk of alluding to Robert Frost three times in three sentences, I am going to avail myself of a link to an old parody of “Mending Wall” (entitled “Mending Pants”) that I wrote 2.5 years ago before most of you had even heard of my blog. I hope you enjoy it and approve the streeeeeetttttccchhhhh of the theme for today. Guess you could call them stretch pants???
Robert Frost seemed to have a thing about boundary markers. “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” and “Mending Wall” are the most notable indicators of this. Several years ago when I had only a few faithful followers, I wrote a parody on “Mending Wall” which I’d like to share with you again. Judging from the likes, the faithful Angloswiss was my only present follower who read it and if some of you are like me, even if you read it two and a half years ago, you probably won’t remember it, so please indulge me and go here:
https://judydykstrabrown.com/2014/09/17/mending-pants-with-apologies-to-robert-frost/
and I’ll get on with my packing, ordering, xeroxing and house ordering for my housesitter. Only three days to go!
Erasures Impossible–Unless
If you are writing in a jiffy,
it may be your spelling’s iffy.
So, unless it doesn’t hurt
to have to scratch out and insert,
It would be wiser, don’t you think,
to write in pencil and not in ink?
For the Three Things Challenge the words were: INK. INSERT IFFY
Image by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash, Used with permission.
Insomnia Blues
I turn up the volume, turn off the lights–
the beginning of one of my fruitless insights
into how to manage falling asleep
by listening to podcast sessions I keep
stored on my computer, backed up on my phone,
although I admit, in the dark, all alone,
I lie sleepless for hours, in spite of trying
various things to assist in my flying
off into dreamland. Music and books,
chants, meditations and other hooks
created to lull a person to dreams,
where I will not go in this lifetime,it seems.
Hour after hour, I try to snooze.
Light up a doobie, sip on some booze,
but nothing works, so as dawn lights my day,
I arise from my bed and I’m off and away
to attend Open Circle–– a weekly gathering
given to performances, lectures and blathering
on local issues. This week it’s my friend.
I find my seat. It’s first row, on the end.
Hear announcements of upcoming speakers and then
my very best friend. I hear her begin,
then fade into dreams, beginning to snore,
lean ever lower, end up on the floor.
So that sleep I’ve been praying for comes, in the end,
rudely, in public, as I lose a friend.
Today’s Word of the Day was “Volume.”
For this week’s Fibbing Friday, the subjects we are forced to lie about are:
1. Who has a licence to kill? It’s written in the word…LlCEnce!
2. Who had a perfect ’10’. Farrah Fawcett’s hubby, Lee Majors.
3. Who said ‘I’ll be back?’ Trump, and unfortunately he was.
4. Who wanted to be a ‘real boy’? Not Michael Jackson.
5.. Who had breakfast at Tiffanys? The mouse patrol cat who lived there.
6. What happened in Wall Street? It got held up.
7. Where would you find the Green Mile? Elon Musk’s bank vault.
8. Who was The Iron Lady? The lady who pressed clothes at our local laundry.
9. What is Watership Down? Seagull feathers stuck to an oceangoing vessel.
10. Who walked the Line? The drunk pulled over by the patrolman.
Reluctant Guest
It was infatuation. He was there at my behest,
and though I hoped for more, he proved to be a slippery guest.
When I reached out for him and he escaped my grasp,
I improvised a harness out of scarf and belt and clasp.
Before you form ideas about my brashness in this tryst,
imagining the lengths that I might go to to be kissed,
I fear that you misunderstand the situation. Maybe,
I did not make it clear that I was bathing sis’s baby!
The Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “guest.”
For Fibbing Friday, the assigned words to define this week are:
1. Artichoke. Painter’s block
2. Brass. A cold bottom.
3. Criteria. A shopping mall for animals.
4. Doppelganger. A member of a weatherman’s group. (Dew-People Ganger)
5. Effervescent. Always odiferous.
6. Frugal. In the mood to dance, mid-sixties style.
7. Gossamer. Someone given to repetitive vacation locations.
8. Hallucinate. To suffer a prolonged, uncontrollable fit of laughter over an old “I Love Lucy” episode.
9. Ingenious. Not fond of the “I Dream of Jeannie” show.
10. Jeopardy. A soirée for geologists.
Art 
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 