Category Archives: Daily Prompt

Pursuing the Wild Prompt

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Pursuing the Wild Prompt

This blog’s teeming with challenges by the day or week.
I seem to find a new one everywhere I seek.
This leads to combinations of words that are deplorable.
At times the stories that they tell, admittedly are horrible.
Still we keep on churning out this poetry and prose
using all these silly words that other people chose.
Why do we use these words that they give us fully blown?
Because the alternative is thinking up our own!

 

The prompts are week, challenge, teem and deplorable.  Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/10/19/rdp-friday-week/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/10/19/fowc-with-fandango-challenge/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/10/13/daily-addictions-2018-week-41/teem
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/10/19/deplorable/

 

After the Ceremony

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After marriage, even after the mundane invades our life, hopefully, some of the magic remains.

After the Ceremony

Oh my dear,
caught in this star-studded cowboy boot world,
I love you more than an Oreo cookie,
more than bubble gum
or a dill pickle.
You are a full gas tank and my shoelaces.
You are both what keeps me going
and what I am reaching out for—
my goal and trophy rolled into one.
You are my ironing board and my blender—
what churns me up and straightens me out.
Everything in the world is caught up in you.

It is flowering, our ordinary world.
Zephyrus peanut butter
and turgid corned beef hash
are surrounded by rosebuds,
soaring heavenward in sartorial bliss.
The sewing machine is holy
and our Dodge truck dreamlike.
The fanciful and practical
are shuffled in our dream world
like cards at a poker table.
A washcloth and a comb soar heavenward.
Birdsong becomes a phonograph needle,
caught in its groove.
Verdant is the garden hose–
pulsating with a new vibrancy.

If I am a tax form, you are my pencil.
I am diaphanous in my kitchen apron,
a fairy in blue jeans.
I could sing an ode to your toothbrush.
If I took a measuring stick to our love,
the world’s breath would be bated,
waiting for the result.
Birdsong would issue from the teakettle
to chorus the announcement.
For oh, my love, our passion is a hammer.
A scythe that slices through the problems of the world:
the shopping lists and the crabgrass.

Love vaporizes our petty problems––
the broken dishwasher
and the broken fingernail––
I am thy bride, thy fairy princess.
Your pencil sharpener.
The trimmer of your wick,
the cooker of your sausage.

My dear, I am turgid in thy love.
You are what wrenches my heart
and nails shut the door
of every misgiving I might have had.
You are mustard to my sauerkraut,
pastrami to my rye.
Love in a Ziplock bag might seem less fairylike,
blander than white bread
and more Sunday School than magical;
but, you are my big zucchini,
my Dove bar and my Orange Crush,
and I am forever thy camellia and thy rose.

Remember me under lindens,
my footsteps filled with magnolia petals
and my cook pot full of stardust.
Heaven resides in our walkup flat, my dear,
and I pulsate every day
with the memory of that honeymoon
which was only our penultimate dream—
leading up to the chock-a-block,
stuffed turkey with all the trimmings,
overflowing Christmas stocking,
burst balloon filled with confetti,
blissful rest of that conjoined life
that with every morning alarm clock
will spill over us again
like a freshly split piñata.

This is a rewrite of a poem first written five years ago. The prompt word today was ceremony.

Disappearing Act

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SheSleeps

Generally, I have no desire to disappear.  Given my choice, you’d have me around forever.  The only exception is when I am ill.  In that case, I just want to draw into my shell and disappear.  This poem written three years ago chronicles such a time:

Skedaddle!

Bring me vitamins and soup,
but please don’t camp upon my stoop.
For when I have the ague or flu,
I’d rather not commune with you!
I’d rather sink into my gloom
sealed up lonely in my room.
Sleep as much as I am able,
use my stomach as a table.

Leave liquids here beside my bed,
but please don’t hover overhead.
An angel is appreciated
if, once immediate needs are sated,
they disappear and leave me to
my soggy Kleenex and the loo!

 

The prompt word today is disappear.

Green Brownies

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Green Brownies

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(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.

Rebel Without A Clause

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These ladies and young ladies are certainly not without causes or clauses! The same is not true of me today.  Mental lapse.  

Rebel Without a Clause

I forgot to write my post today. It simply slipped my mind.
It was not done on purpose, for I’m not the rebel kind.
I do not flaunt convention. I do not break the rules.
I am polite to everyone. I gladly suffer fools.
So I don’t know the reason why it slipped my mind today
to look the daily prompt up and then to have my say.
So since I have not written, no poem exists because
I guess you’d have to say I am a rebel without a clause!

Phew! Just in the nick of time. If I hadn’t realized 15 minutes ago that I’d forgotten to write to the WordPress daily prompt, it would have been the first time in four years that I hadn’t done so!  Thanks to forgottenman for finding an appropriate photo to post with it.  The prompt today was rebel.

Past Prime

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Past Prime

She stamps her little foot down. A tantrum, I would guess.
She will not put these panties on. She will not wear this dress.
She doesn’t want to brush her teeth. Tangles swathe her head.
She doesn’t want her breakfast. She doesn’t want her bed.
Her grandma shuts the door on her. She’ll wait until she’s grown.
She used up all her patience on kids who were her own!!!

 

With tongue in cheek, I’d like to dedicate this blog to Karen over at her Momshieb blog. You might want to read her link as well!  She’s crazy about her grandkids but even grandmas have their limits. The WordPress prompt word today is tantrum.

Chancy Cuisine

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Chancy Cuisine

I ordered cottage cheese pancakes with bacon on the side.
I’d heard they were delicious, so I took it in my stride
when I saw them on the menu, not thinking it absurd
until I took my first big bite and bit into a curd.
So what if cottage cheese had lumps? I thought it wouldn’t matter.
I thought somehow that they’d be blended smoothly in the batter.
Not so, I found, attempting to mash them with my fork.
and take  a bite of pancake, then a bite of pork.
The pork and syrup didn’t help this dish lumpy and pallid.
It still tasted like breakfast that was conjoined with a salad!
By the time I’d drunk my coffee down to its last dregs
and tried to hide my pancakes under my scrambled eggs,
my friends were finishing their meals, replete and smacking lips,
settling their bills and figuring their tips.
Their breakfasts were not strange ones—neither oddly-paired nor lumpy.
Nothing in today’s cuisine had left them starved and grumpy.
They went on to see a matinee and other day’s adventures,
while I went home to pry the curds out of my brand new dentures!
Next time I’ll order scrambled eggs, an omelet or a waffle,
not chancing more exotic fare potentially awful.

 

The prompt work today is partake.

Sport Retort

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Sport Retort

When faced with talk of games and sport,
I seldom have cause to retort.
For dribbling, sparring, touching  down
raise no emotions but a frown.
The games I play are just of mind
Less physically taxing and more kind.

Using tongues and brains to spar,
I am more likely  under par
than when I hit a pock-marked ball
off of the course to hit a wall,
bounce off and into someone’s car
to be transported to regions far.

I have not thought to scream out, “Fore!”
My terminology’s as poor,
I fear, as my coordination,
I will not, ever, stun the nation
with my prowess with balls or bats,
parallel bars, hurdles or mats.

Likewise, I have no interest in
watching others skate and spin,
touch balls down or thrust a fist.
When it comes to sports, I must insist
when the tube depicts each bout,
I am forgiven for running out!!!

This is a reblog of a piece I wrote three years ago. The Prompt today was parallel.

Rush

6 Replies

Rush

Get a leg on. Hurry hurry.
Life is just a daily flurry.
Feed the cat and feed the dog.
Take your pills and write your blog.
Company’s coming. Make a curry.
Lately, life is getting blurry
from all there is I have to do:
write and clean and cook and glue.
Things pile up but I’ve no time.
Days had more hours in my prime.
But now I’m always in a rush,
caught within the daily crush.
My “to do” list has me trapped.
I crave a life that is less mapped.
I fear my rushing won’t be over
until I’m pushing up the clover!!!

The prompt today is rush.

Morning Alarm Clock

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Waiting for breakfast.

Click on any photo to enlarge all.

Morning Alarm Clock

First the ghoulish yowl of cat.
Then the dogs’ accompanying scat.

The far off whine of the machine
that whines the gardener’s routine.

With creak of valve and scrape of tool,
water streams into the pool.

This water surging from the jet
completes my waking up quartet.

Yolanda’s key turns in the door,
adding one harmony more.

Her music joins the morning’s set
to swell it into a quintet.

What finer way  to stir one’s head
on alternate mornings, here in bed?

The prompt is quartet.