Category Archives: humorous poem

Info Overload

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Info Overload

Contemporary culture is one I dread to contemplate—
much more prone to outcry than to logical debate.
Folks bury fact with fiction misleading and irrelevant,
quelling truth and logic in favor of their rave and rant.

Who can deal with all the various sorts of messaging,
let alone absorb events rarely less than harrowing?
Lately my delete button has become my dearest friend
as I limit messages mostly to ones I send!!!

 

Prompts today are bury, outcry, contemporary, contemplate, absorb and irrelevant.

Party Animal

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Party Animal

I trip and stumble,
fall and tumble
(Lately haste
not to my taste.)
Incapacitated? Yes!
What’s the reason? Can’t you guess?
Once, though I was hale and hearty,
life of every wild party, 
now I draw less audiences,
fewer smiles and way more winces
as I slip up, toe or tongue 
on syllables or ladder rung.
These faux pas once made due to whiskey
back when I was young and frisky
are due to age’s cruel spasms
instead of youth’s enthusiasms.

Prompts for today are trip, mumble, incapacitated, hale, draw andtaste. Photo by Hillary P on Unsplash

Retire in Mexico?

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Retire in Mexico?

I never thought retirement
would ever be the way I went,
so imagine my embarrassment
when I found my instincts leant
 toward letting my employment go
and heading down to Mexico!

When I checked out the internet
to see what info I could get,
it led me to a rendezvous
that told me what I had to do.
It’s been no struggle, you can see,
Retirement was made for me!!!

Prompt words are cusp, rendezvous, retirement, struggle, embarrassment and internet.

Karaoke Detour

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Karaoke Detour

When our Karaoke Adventure Tour took off to fly to Glasgow
we had not an inkling it would be such a fiasco.
It started with complaints when we tried to rehearse
and before we even managed to reach the second verse,
an angry man behind me began to scream and curse,
causing his long-suffering wife to  hit him with her purse!

The distress of other passengers ignited accusations
that they sought placation for with further free libations.
But an uncanny silence brought the fracas to an end
as four hours early, we started to descend.
The stewardess ran forward to grab a parachute
with a dozen passengers following in pursuit.

The singers ceased their singing and the angry man his cussing.
Passengers still in their seats so busy with their fussing
to fasten tight their seatbelts that their drinks were overturned for
they’d forgotten all those further drinks that they had yearned for.
Then the pilot’s voice came booming through the awful din,
to finally advise us of what trouble we were in.

So many violent storms between California and Taipan
that he was going to have to land our carrier in Japan!
Then terror turned to anger as folks began complaining
with little indication  of when protests might be waning,
while I and my companions started up another chorus,
sure that this disaster had been planned completely for us.

What better place than Tokyo for karaoke fun?
(A better place than Glasgow for our singing to be done!)
With no machines to guide us, nonetheless we lifted voices,
song requests from passengers reflected in our choices.
I guess the man behind me must have settled down to nap,
for his wife joined in our chorus with her purse safe in her lap!

 

Prompt words are karaoke, canny, accusation, complaint, pursuit and fiasco.

A Valediction Forbidding Morning

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Disclaimer: John Donne wrote “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.”  This is not that poem!!!

A Valediction Forbidding Morning

When the moon is at its peak
It is the nighttime’s time to speak
words worthy of our full attention
yet this is a mere audition.
Another speaker’s  coming soon
who has hopes to debate the moon.

The sun will soon commence to snivel
that moon’s sentiments are drivel.
Thus day and night both ebb and flow
informing us by what they show
of light and dark and sun and moon,
all of their phases gone too soon.

Each noonday sun flashing its warning,
every moon forbidding morning
while warning the ladybug
to check her babies are all snug,
for as the sun climbs ever higher,
it might set her house on fire.

 

Prompts for the day are valediction, drivel, audition, worthy, peak and ladybug.

Found (For NaPoWriMo 2023 Day 4)

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The prompt today was to write a triolet. A triolet is an eight-line poem. All the lines are in iambic tetrameter (for a total of eight syllables per line), and the first, fourth, and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final lines. This means that the poem begins and ends with the same couplet. Beyond this, there is a tight rhyme scheme (helped along by the repetition of lines) ABaAabAB. Actually, there was a triolet challenge that I wrote for twice before for NaPoWriMo, once exactly ten years ago in 2013, the first year I did NaPoWriMo, and again in 2020. The poems as well as the cats  I  eventually “found”  back then are below:

A Poem a Minute with a Triolet In it

When first I tried to write this rhyme
I could not seem to make it scan.
In short, I felt less than sublime
when first I tried to write this rhyme;
but then I took the proper time
and proved the truth as other than:
“When first I tried to write this rhyme
I could not seem to make it scan.”

 

With Workmen Here

The cats have flown, I know not where.
They’ve chosen to remain aloof.
They don’t await me on the stair.
The cats have flown, I know not where.
Not one to steal my favorite chair.
I do not hear them on the roof.
The cats have flown, I know not where.
They’ve chosen to remain aloof.

 

The assignment for day four of NaPoWriMo 2023 is to write a triolet.

Time Temporal, for NaPoWriMo Day 3, 2023

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Time Temporal

                  by Judy Dykstra-Brown

Shall I contrast thee to a winter’s night?
Thou art less lovely and more tempestuous.
The lack of wind doth still November’s empty stalks,
Oe’r which the winter hath too long a power.
Sometimes the too-cold moon hides ‘neath the clouds.
Then rarely doth it’s pitted face shine forth;
And dark from dark can sometimes rise,
Spurred on by fate or providence’s static plan.
But thy short winter shall soon pass away,
Restore to thee the homeliness of death.
Nor shall that birth that brought you forth to light
Still claim thee when temporal time shall stop thy growth.
As men lose breath and eyes lose sight,
So dies this poem, and draws thee with it to thy grave.

Sonnet 18

            by William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

 

For NaPoWriMo  Day 3, they wanted us to write an “Opposite Poem” based on a famous poem. Mine is above.

The Professor Joins E Harmony

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The Professor Joins E Harmony

On his first round of internet daming,
sure he was intent on shaming,

his blind date stirred up such a fuss
when he called her pulchritudinous,

that it proved a barrier to fun
as she announced their date was done!

His mistake was simply ’cause he
didn’t know her brain was fuzzy

and unaccustomed to such words
that more literary birds

might realize were a compliment
in fact, a word meant to augment

the chance that he might marry her
instead became a barrier

of misunderstanding that
made her think he’d called her fat!!!!

The lesson learned from this brief story
is that blind dating can be gory.

What a guy has got to do
before he makes a swipe anew

is to ascertain his date’s I.Q.
before he chooses words to woo!

Prompt words for today are rambunctious, augment, fuzzy, pulchritudinous, shaming and barrier. Illusration from the Nutty Professor Site. No attribution.

Romantically Retired

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Romantically Retired

I think I’ve formerly related
that I’m neither wooed nor dated.
Zero heroes, zero traces
of besotted hearts or faces.

Gamblers better put their money
on the fact I’ll have no honey.
Chances more likely for a win
on the roulette wheel’s random spin.

Fortune tellers’ only visions
are of partings and divisions.
No new meetings, no reunion
that might prompt a future union.

So I guess I’ll go on missing
bouts of geriatric kissing.
And instead of passions new,
fond memories will have to do.

Prompt words today are spin, related, traces, vision, money and zero.

Teen Wisdom

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Teen Wisdom

The children are all burgeoning into adolescence,
though like shaken sodas, they emerge with effervescence.

Not thinking of the consequences, behavior audacious,
argumentative and therefore maddeningly pugnacious.

Parents’ beliefs are fallacies. Teens think that only they
have the means and knowledge to clearly know the way

to surge into the future, the internet their guide—
believing all its stated truths are bonafide.

They don’t listen to their parents because, for sure, they’re wrong.
They’d rather get their wisdom from TikTok or a song.

For this generation, electronic media rules,
dispensing equal wisdom from sages and from fools.

Is it truth or fiction? Is it wack or cool?
How can they know the difference? Clearly, hormones rule.

 

Prompts today are consequences, fallacy, pugnacious, burgeon, mean and soda.

(The non-teen who wrote this poem was so wack that she misspelled TikTok as TikToc. Some teenager just clued her in.) And to be fair, there are probably just as many adults misguided by the internet as there are teens who are.