Category Archives: Daily Prompt

Quick Change

 

Quick Change

This modern world has changed and changed
until I have become estranged.
These alterations make me dizzy.
I do not like my world so busy.

The young are used to change, it’s true.
They love the instant and the new.
Texts and sound bites come so fast.
Nothing’s really built to last.

But, for someone over fifty,
all this change is hardly nifty.
When at each end the candle’s burned,
when everything we’ve newly learned,

when everything that we hold dear
turns obsolete within one year,
we’re always slightly out of gear,
which makes us feel unjustly queer.

They make these changes without a clue.
Let’s start out minor, then work up to
the major things they’ve set askew:
(I will not mention Dr. Who.)

Every computer becomes its clone.
I cannot use the telephone.
My applications change so quick
that I have come to feel I’m thick.

Skype makes its changes overnight.
(Yet rarely ever improves the site.)
Microsoft Word just loves to change,
which leaves her users feeling strange.

Move this to there and that down here;
so all my mental powers, I fear,
are spent in figuring out the APP
and organizing a mental map

of how to write instead of what,
creating one big mental glut.
No room for creativity.
No safe place where our minds soar free.

We’re always “searching” for, instead,
our minds caught up in fear and dread
of where they’ve moved the enlarge bar to
in this week’s Word processing zoo!

Our e-mail servers have joined the plot.
I feel like pitching out the lot.
Just when I’ve learned most every trick
of tool and contact, every lick—

their Machiavellian, evil team
goes and changes the whole darn scheme!
But when we’re sending coast-to-coastal,
the alternative is going postal.

So though we bitch and though we frown,
they are the only game in town;
and so they have us where they want us.
Though they frustrate, ire and daunt us,

one after another, they are the same,
playing at this modern game
of change for change’s sake, it’s true.
There’s really nothing much to do.

So I submit, though in a tizzy,
I’ll relax less and keep real busy.
I’ll leave the cyber world alone
and concentrate on just one bone

I have to pick in this modern world,
and I say this with my top lip curled.
Max Factor, Revlon, Almay, please—
I kneel before you on my knees.

Leave the lipstick colors that we hold dear
alone! Don’t change them every year.
Each time you cancel one that’s zesty,
to find another makes us testy!!!

 

I admit.. Repost of a poem from four years ago.  Admit it, you didn’t even remember it did, you?  I certainly didn’t. The prompt today is micro.

Mitigating Circumstances

Mitigating Circumstances

It’s not that I am inefficient.
It’s just that I had insufficient
time to do what you requested.
So, if I was being tested,
in doing all that you have asked,
it seems that I was overtasked.

 

 

The prompt today was inefficient.

Outsmarting My Smart TV

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My TV is Smarter Than I Am

My TV is smarter than I am, springing to life on a whim.
When my  Jack-of-all-trades comes to work here, I think she is flirting with him.
She flicks on and then off in a second, just like she has given a wink.
Or perhaps registers disapproval by shutting us off with a blink.

I know she has much to complain of since I purchased her two years ago.
I’ve never connected to cable or dish, so she doesn’t have too much to show.
Although she connects to computers, my Apple igores that she’s here.
That I haven’t read the instructions? I know it’s exceedingly queer.

She’s equipped to show movies in 3D, but my housekeeper threw out the glasses.
So if I want movies to jump out at me, I must go view them out with the masses
and not in the privacy of my own home with my cat or myself or my friends.
I haven’t checked out buying more on the Web, and for this I must soon make amends.

My computer is usually my viewer of choice when my friend sends me movies by Skype.
The films that he sends are amazing. He knows the best subjects and type
of videos that I like viewing. They are smart and they’re funny and Indie.
He doesn’t send action/adventure or slapstick or horror or Hindi.

 But I never watch them on my Smart screen, preferring my laptop to it.
I set it right there at my poolside and watch as I try to get fit
doing my pool aerobics for an hour and a half, maybe two.
My workouts just seem to last longer whenever I’ve something to view.

 My TV can see out the window that I’m faithful to screens that are small
and I’m sure that I’ve given a complex to my big gal I don’t watch at all.
So I started a “Last Sunday” film night where I can share films that I savor
We eat and we drink and we talk and we laugh as we all view the movies I favor.

For one night a month, my TV springs to life when I plug in the little thumb drive.
Her face flushes up in an enormous blush, for she sees that I know she’s alive.
The eyes of all eight of us fix upon her. She’s the center of all our attention.
We laugh at her jokes and cry at her pathos. Respond to her mysteries with tension.

But the rest of the month her expression is blank, sitting alone in her corner
looking so sad and so lacking in life that I feel that perhaps I should mourn her.
The first time she lit up when I entered the room to say she didn’t recognize me,
I realized with shock for the very first time that my TV could both talk and see!

I hadn’t quite realized the extent of her powers when I bought her at Costco that day.
My old TV weighed in at five hundred pounds—more than a TV should weigh.
I’d inherited it from my mom when she died so I had a personal attachment,
but to move it alone, one risked heart attack or at least a vertebral detachment.

And so I gave in to cajoling by friends that it was time to buy another.
and I gave away the monster TV that I had acquired from my mother.
But guilt has suffused me ever after that day, for I really don’t need a TV,
and this smart girl is lacking in challenges, just wasting her talents on me.

She’s recently started to turn herself on (something that girls alone do)
and talking to me when I enter the room and enter her angle of view.
Finally I just unplugged her—an act of most selfish defiance.
I haven’t the time in my life just to chat—especially to an appliance!

 

Hate to admit this poem is an edited version of one written over three years ago and I still flounder around trying to work this TV. The world has evolved beyond me.  I should be the one blushing! The prompt today is blush.

Confessions of a Line-Crasher.

Confessions of a Line-Crasher 

Patience is not my forte. I put it on a shelf
and withdraw my impatience. It better suits myself.
I do not enjoy waiting for my turn in a store,
and bank lines make me want to barrel for the door.
I will not take a number when going out to dine.
I do not get my jollies from standing in a line.
Pharmacies and waiting rooms are simply not for me.
Let alone the airport queues when I’ve a need to pee.
If patience is a virtue, I fear I’ve flunked the test,
I think it is my birthright to go before the rest!!!

 

The prompt today was patience.

Donald’s World (POTUS-Speak)

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Donald’s World

It seems reality’s been hacked.
The dice are loaded. Cards are stacked.
Truth is no longer so exact.
Actuality’s been cracked
and reason pilloried and racked.

Verisimilitude is yacked
and common sense has long been sacked,
along with logic, reason, tact.
So what’s been rumored, gossiped, quacked
is now more true than proven fact!

 

The prompt word today is fact.

Lest the Love Affair End Too Soon

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Lest the Love Affair End Too Soon

He’s so suave, my boyfriend Jesse—
trimmed and polished and so dressy—
that no one would ever guess he
lives in rooms so doggone messy.
Ties draped over backs of chairs,
spare shoes tumbling down the stairs,
underwear in places where
you wouldn’t think to find a pair
of  crumpled socks or BVDs.
Things piled wherever he might please.

Pizza boxes you’re sure to see
on the divan or Smart TV.
Pockets emptied where he wishes—
piles of coins in dirty dishes.
He’s smooth and debonair, for sure.
I cannot question his allure.
Ladies fawn on him,  and flirts
flutter eyelids, swish their skirts.
He’s charming and I don’t dispute
that he is terminally cute.

All those praises, I’d repeat,
but I would never say he’s neat!!!
So if you must, if you’ve the whim,
make a pass. Make off with him.
Hold hands in front of movie screens,
make love in cabs or limousines.
Meet him any place he chooses—
ski weekends, romantic cruises.
Go to Vail, Paris or Rome.
Just don’t let him take you home!

 

The prompt today is messy.

Mismatched

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Mismatched

You seem to dwell, dear, in the main
securely down in the inane.
If only you could just refrain
from loudly voicing your disdain.
Astrology you find a pain,
consider ESP insane,
while astral travel is the bane
of your existence and you’re fain
to scratch your head and shake your mane,
swearing you’ll open a vein
if I don’t try to put a rein
on my attempts to reach you where
you constantly refuse to fare.
Meditation’s out with you,
and you’ll have nothing to do
with Ouija boards or the I Ching.
You do not “Ohm” or chant or sing
to anyone or anything.
In short, you’re firmly planted here
on the earth, so dour and drear.
While my mind dwells in the stars,
yours hangs out in lowlife bars.
This love match has not scored a win.

Match.Com has erred again.
And so, my dear, ta-ta, adieu.
I guess I’m breaking up with you.
I fear that I have tried in vain
to find you on the astral plane.

The prompt today is astral.

Dad’s Makeover

 

Dad’s Makeover

OMG, you guys.  Daddy slept all morning so I made a fast run to the house to find his reading glasses and pick up some clean underwear.  Hold onto your hats, because I have big news. Our old Dad has really cleaned up his act!  He got rid of all the empty paper bags and National Geographics. There is space between objects in the refrigerator. You can see the hall walls again. No countless stacks of empty jelly glasses and yogurt cups.  No drawers full of used twist ties and rubber bands streaked with carbon from newspapers thrown twenty years ago.

All of the flowerpots with dry cracked soil and the ossified skeletons of plants? Gone, along with their friends the stacks of empty pizza boxes and  six packs of beer bottles.No cupboard full of clam chowder.  No year’s supply of ketchup stockpiled in the pantry. In the bathroom drawer, just one tube of toothpaste squeezed from the end. No ranks of out-of-date prescription bottles.  No shriveled tubes of Preparation H.

Mama’s clothes are finally gone from the closet. Her dusty doilies, vanished from every surface in the house. No mismatched socks and wrenches in his bedroom drawers.

How did this come about? Impossible to say as he still hasn’t come to after his surgery, but if I were to assay the probabilities, I’d say a woman might be involved.  There is a vase of flowers in his hospital room and a container of homemade soup in the little fridge beside his bed.  His hair looks newly cut and his nostril hairs are not in evidence.  All presentable underwear in the valise  I packed for him and sis, his jockeys are in shades of maroon, navy blue and rust brown!!!  No more untidy whities.  No more undershirts with holes in them. It’s like they operated on his whole life, not just his appendix.  Removed every dusty, tattered, useless, outgrown part of him and plopped down a new father in his place.

Oops.. gotta run soon.  The nurse just said he has another visitor. Not a family member, but the one who admitted him to the hospital last night at midnight. The one who left the key to his house for me.  They say only one visitor at a time, so guess I’ll have to leave when she gets here.  Door opening. She’s coming in the door! I’ll call you from the car.

(After a ten minute lapse, the phone rings again.)

Okay. You guys? Are you all there?  Sit down, will you? All sitting down? A slight modification. Make that a he who came in the door!

The prompt word today is assay.

No Longer in the Present

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No Longer in the Present

Seated around the table in our favorite cafe,
attention to each other has come to be passé
We are not present here and now. We’re all in other places
as we stare at tiny screens, intent on other faces.

The friends we have around us will simply have to wait
for our interest in the world-at-large to finally abate.
The news that’s happening elsewhere is simply more amusing
than what might be happening in this space our body’s using.

Other friends are funnier in their “selfie” poses—
pooching out their lips at us and scrunching up their noses.
It won’t do to look natural, we have to look unique
in the selfsame pose that all selfie-flashers seek.

So if your friends are boring, not half so chic as you,
you always have the option to make a Tweet or two.
Check out the latest fashions available from China.
They’ll only take three months to reach you here in Carolina.

Check out the weather in Tibet and give YouTube a glance.
Companions won’t distract you if you don’t give them a chance.
Living one life at a time no longer has to do
so long as you remember to have your phone with you!

So if you’ve dropped a French fry and spilled ketchup down your dress,
you needn’t be embarrassed. It couldn’t matter less.
Intent on Twitter, Instagram, Facetiming and Facebooking,
the friends with you won’t notice, for nobody is looking.

The prompt word is present.

Costume

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Costume

I want to be an artist, a writer and a wife—
juggling all these masks with just a minimum of strife.
A lover, mother, daughter, cousin, sister-in-law, sister.
A friend to every woman and a temptress to each mister.
A master to my canine friends and slave to all my cats.
A pal to all my blogger friends, not just to swell my stats.
As well as to some Facebook friends and email friends and Skype.
(I no longer use snail mail—I’m simply not the type!)
So, if I were being truthful and I didn’t give a fig
about what others thought of me, I’d dress up like a pig.
Why the porcine costume? The tail curled in a ring?
Because in my life choices—I want everything!

The prompt today was costume.