Category Archives: Poem

Words

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Words

By their adjustment,
I change their drift,
but when I alter their lilt,
I am as transformed by them
as they are by me.

I am inebriated by words.
I reel in their power
as they call my bluff.

They reflect the changes in me
I would otherwise not know.
I can float in their buoyant comfort
or shoot the rapids of emotion.

Words are my river and my raft,
my cushion and that daredevil conveyance
into a new stream of thought

from which I never return
to the exact same world
I left from.

 

Prompt words today are bluff, inebriated, adjustment, lilt and shoot. Photo of the Current River in the Ozarks by jdb.

Wild Open Wordle 520, Sept 26, 2021

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Wild Open

The spacious room is open to the clear blue sky.
Waves of grain sway drowsily with a distant sigh.
Somehow, things seem simple in this open place,
everything instilled with a sort of easy grace.
If what you seek is quiet, listen to what I say,
There is no better place to choose to spend your day.

 

Prompt words today are spacious, open, room, blue, say, grace, waves, plains, simple, drowsy, clear, seek. Photo by Forgottenman.

For the Sunday Whirl Wordle prompt

“That” Friend Sept 26, 2021

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“That” Friend

My friend is amenable, but she is clueless.
If memories were sticky notes, hers would be glueless.
It seems like her calendar’s up for debate,
and if she shows up, she is, chronically late.

She’s always slow to get the ball rolling
for our monthly date for dinner and bowling.
Her memory’s airy. It blows where it blows.
Her socks are unmatched. There are tags on her clothes.

Her hair is disheveled, and It’s often the case
that traces of night cream are left on her face.
In short, she’s a space case. Her life’s in arrears.
If she were a car, she’d be missing some gears.

We gave up long ago in trying to change her.
We can’t straighten her out or fix or arrange her.
Over the years we’ve become less perplexible
figuring she’s here to keep us more flexible.

 

Prompts for the day are amenable, late, clueless,  airy and bowl. Photo for illustrative purposes only. The friends in this picture are anything but clueless. Not necessarily so for the person in the foreground, however!  ;o)

Wedding Dalliance

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Wedding Dalliance

Though it’s a lovely wedding, after the seventh toast,
you’re tired of the well-wishing and each new smart riposte.

You’ve had too much champagne. You can’t face another bubble,
so you ask for a martini and say, “Make it a double!”

You’re fatigued by the spectacle and need to get some air,
so you wander to the terrace to view the cloudscapes there.

Your shoes are less than comfortable, so you slip them off,
 and find that you are lost in dreams when you hear the cough 

of an interloper who has joined you in escape—
another wedding attendee who’s come outside to gape.

He joins you at the railing and elbows you for room,
and before you know it, you are flirting with the groom!

When you feel his arms around you, you take it in your stride.
You’ll have no regrets later, for luckily, you’re the bride!

 

Prompt for today are cloudscapes, attend, spectacle, riposte and comfortable. Image by Marcus Lewis on Unsplash.

Leftover Nightmares: Weekly Wordle 519

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Leftover Nightmares

Sharp teeth of moths that daily fray the fabric of my dreaming
through the faulty screens of youth continue to come streaming.
Will nothing seek to stop their flights and free me from my dread
of lines of dusty millers that by rights should now be dead?

I try to curb my memory—the dull sheen of their eyes
as they fly slowly toward me in their moth disguise.
All those evil prairie spirits, rising from the grass
to find me after midnight and fill my dreams enmasse.

 

This poem is partially memory, partially fiction. The flutter of Miller moths, the adult form of the cutworm, are so much a part of my growing up on the prairies of South Dakota that I named my first book, “Prairie Moths.”  Then when I built my own house in Wyoming, moths again rose to swarm around me–so many that I had to light ceiling bulbs at night and put large bowls of sudsy water under the lightbulbs to trap the moths by the hundreds to free my house from them. So, although the surviving nightmares of moths are completely exaggerated, the theme is authentic, brought out by this week’s Wordle prompts. Prompt words today are daily, sheen, rights,  try, nothing, sharp, moth, fray, free, line, seeks and streaming.

For The Sunday Whirl Weekly Wordle Prompt 519

The One Thuosand Dollar Error

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The One Thuosand Dollar Error

It was duplicitous lithography that landed him in jail,
for he found the thousand dollar bill impossible to nail.
Mr. Cleveland’s mustache was a bit askew,
and he messed up the order of the “o” and “u.”

And even though he crows about his quality of paper,
sure he could subsist for life just on this one bold caper,
the first bill that he tried to pass put him in a cell.
If you’re going to be a counterfeiter, best you learn to spell!

 

Word prompts today are crow, duplicitous, lithography subsist and paper.

The Docent of the Midnight Gallery

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A little humor to dispel the effect of the paintings presented above: Mealancholy: The remembrance of the day’s repast.(Those meals taken before your diet began.) 

That silly definition was prompted by the fact that I noticed I’d misspelled the first prompt below while establishing the link. Here is the real word plus its companions:

The actual prompt words today are melancholy, Kafkaesque, gallery, cosset and black.

The Docent of the Midnight Gallery

Stark and grim and melancholy—harsh and Kafkaesque,
she ruled the midnight gallery from behind her desk.
Far from being cosseted, viewers were oft upbraided.
She moaned and screeched at visitors as though infuriated.
Skeletal and  shrouded, her visage veiled in black,
she insured no visitor ever ventured back!

Bridge Game

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Bridge Game

Free from any adversary, safe from all deceptions,
the captain ruled his ship without yielding to exceptions.
So the cruise proceeded with ease from day to night,
and if any denizen was made to feel contrite,
it was not the captain who was made to feel the shame,
for when upon the water, he was spared from any blame
and so felt no contrition for all that he declared,
no matter how incongruous or how reason-impaired.
He was not held accountable for any misjudged thing,
for within his dominion, he was undisputed king.

 

Prompt words today are adversary, exception, cruise, contrite and safe. Image by Daniele D. Andreti on Unsplash

Cold Snap

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Cold Snap

When Autumn winds its avant course and takes its paint box out,
Winter with its probity pursues another route.
Freezing all connections between the leaves and limbs,
it snaps off all Fall’s paintings crisply at the stems.

It is as though the bourgeoisie has seized the reins at last
and expunged the riffraff artist with a single blast.
If Autumn’s the iconoclast, Winter must seal the norm
by covering its statements with a winter storm.

When Spring speaks out its message through the meadow lark,
stodgy frigid Winter ceases making its mark.
Then after Summer pales Spring’s green and dries the colors out,
it is the turn of Autumn to throw pigment about.

Season after season, the colors build and fade,
every new stage cancelling progress the last one made,
then building up its opposite thinking it might win,
not seeing life’s a painting that all of them are in.

 

Prompt words for today are autumn, course, bourgeoisie, probity and speaker.

The Perfect Man

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The Perfect Man

I know from what his kind is cast.
He’s fearless as he is steadfast.
He does not vaunt his strength or looks,
excels at sports and reads good books.

Sexy and mysterious, 
he’s musically serious—
motivated from within
to play a wicked violin.

He is as solid as a rock.
Nobody needs to wind his clock.
And yet I had to choose another,
for, alas, he is my brother!!!

Prompt words today are fearless, steadfast, digitally, vaunt and wind. Photo by Silas Tolles on Unsplash.