Photo by Glenn Buttkus
Concrete Poem
(Exposed Aggregate)
You cut a channel through my flat heart,
straight and sure, as though it had not already been set.
Miracle worker. Perfect craftsman,
sculpting the impossible medium.
For the dVerse Poets Pub prompt. Go HERE to see poems by other poets answering the prompt.
Peddler’s Daughter
My father was a spruiker. At the juncture of each road,
he pulled his wagon to the side and spilled out all his load.
His wagon, heavy-laden, contained such treasures that
he knew he would sell something. He had his spiel down flat.
He had an old pump organ whose callithumpian tunes
filled the air with music from the treetops to the dunes.
People came from miles away to see what caused the din,
then grouped around the wagon to see what was within.
This commenced the distribution of all my papa’s treasures:
clothes and pans and furbelows and other worldly pleasures:
squeezeboxes and vases and women’s pantaloons,
chamber pots and laces and inflatable pontoons.
Pre-loved dolls for little girls and balls for little boys.
Jump ropes, checkers, building blocks, assorted wind-up toys.
Tobacco plugs for Grandpa and canning jars for Gran.
Corsets for vain ladies to decrease their middle span.
Bridles for one’s horses and ropes to lead their cows.
Chicken feed and saddles and feeding trays for sows.
There was hardly anything that wagon did not hold,
and my father’s selling spiel was loud and brash and bold.
“Huzzah huzzah, huzzzah!” he’d call out to the crowd,
his bounty spread for viewing and touching was allowed.
Everything available–all that you could see
except for one thing on the wagon seat, and that small girl was me!!!!
Prompt words today are spruiker, juncture, callithumpian, lade and distribution. Image by Tamara Garcevic on Unsplash, used with permission.
spruiker noun at spruik verb. DEFINITIONS1. 1. (Australian English) someone who tries to persuade people to buy something, use a service, etc often in a dishonest or exaggerated way.
Callithumpian refers to a band of discordant instruments or a noisy parade.
Whirlwind
Cookie crumbs, pumpkin seeds pepper the floor
beneath the stool of this child I adore—
a slovenly child who is perfectly able
to spill half her milk on the floor near the table.
As she sits cutting paper dolls, paper bits flutter
down from the piles of snippets and clutter
she amasses around her in any room where
I’ve worked half the morning just to prepare
for the meeting with friends that occurs in an hour.
The sofa cushions she spread in a tower
are ringing the sofa back, placed in a mound
to catch mountaineer Barbie should she fall to the ground.
Covered by green napkins, the pillows now pass
for a fantasy hillside all covered in grass.
I scoop up the clutter and then the small miss,
ransom the cookies for a small kiss,
then hurry to try to clean up the room.
Locate new napkins, then brandish the broom,
sweeping up crumbs and paper and things
left in her wake just before the bell rings
and the first guest enters, surveying the scene
now cleared of the mess. Perfectly serene.
“I don’t know how you do it, with work and a kid,”
my friend says, not knowing the stuff that I hid
just two minutes ago behind the hall door
that once only held coats but now holds a lot more:
Barbie dolls, crayons and scissors and scraps
as well as neat rows of sweaters and wraps.
Family secrets that we’ll never tell
that every mommy knows all too well.
Prompt words today are seed, flutter, grounds, sloven and milk.
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
–Wm. Shakespeare
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
—Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man
“The Dunning–Kruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating
that people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability.”
–(Wikipedia)
“The Fool Doth Think He Is Wise”
Although his conclusion was toothsome and salty,
it was my colleague’s premise I found to be faulty.
His logic? Ramshackle, for facts in his keeping
would make a logician run, screaming and leaping,
out of the room and over the hill,
when of this insanity, he’d had his fill.
Light intellect teamed up with heavy endeavor,
expressed by a soul neither heartful nor clever
is a dangerous pairing in this Internet world,
where such like-minded fools, their illogic unfurled,
can find a wide audience, hardly deserved,
that would leave Einstein weeping and Hawking unnerved.
Prompt words are colleague, ramshackle, leaping, premise and heavy.
He Said, She Said
When she questioned his fidelity, he said she was a loser,
though he was the real lowlife—a bully and a bruiser.
“We’re not a pair,” he snapped at her. “I never took an oath
that I would be true to you, in fact, I’m rather loath
to say that when I married you, it wasn’t a mistake.
The only thing I liked about it was the wedding cake!
I’d had a few too many the day that we were hitched
and ever since we had the kids, you have bitched and bitched.
You like to snap my head off If I partake with the boys
and come home after midnight. If I make the slightest noise
and if I wake the kids up, well, so what? They’re my kids, too.
Perhaps they’d like to spend some time with me instead of you.
So what if it is 3 a.m.? Tomorrow we’ll sleep in.
You’d think that playing with your kids past midnight is a sin!!!!
The way to keep your man is to practice your felicity.
Instead of gripes, I’d like to see some wifely elasticity.
I always was a party guy. I always was a rover.
If you expect much more of me, my time with you is over.”
To Which She Answered:
The kids are at my mother’s, your packed bag in the garage.
Almost from the beginning, our marriage was a mirage.
I’ve called the man to change the locks. I’ve closed our bank account.
There’s money in your suitcase—a very small amount.
My father bought our house and my salary, at best,
is what was in the bank account. You drank up all the rest.
So what if it is 3 a.m.? You’re used to nighttime games.
Check your little black book. It’s sure to yield some names.
If you’ve had too much to drink, it’s best you don’t drive far,
but I’m sure that you’ll be comfy sleeping in the car.
I’ve decided to withdraw from marital complicity,
and that will bring you what you want. In short, your wife’s felicity!!
Prompts today are “not a pair,” snap, partake, felicity and loser. Photo by Elvis Bekmanis on Unsplash, used with permission.
Final Curtain
Behind a tangle of bushes and impenetrable wood,
paint peeling from its walls in strips, the ancient mansion stood.
A blemish on our neighborhood, the property condemned.
By its neighbors’ pristine hedges, its boundaries were hemmed
like burnsides on each side of an unruly mustache.
And no amount of pressure and no amount of cash
could persuade the one who lived there—a widow old and frail
to repair her ravaged property or put it up for sale.
And though neighbors voiced their protests, she challenged one and all
simply by remaining behind her crumbling wall.
At night, thin wispy music from her gramophone
leaked out through the bushes as she danced on all alone
over creaking floorboards, reliving bygone days
and a life once vivid now diminished to a haze.
Reenacting dramas of a life gone by too fast,
she played the heroine while other roles all went uncast.
Prompt words today are challenge, blemish, burnsides, tangle and property. Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash, used with permission.
Risky Business
How have you found your way into my dreams,
ripping my comfort apart at the seams?
I thought I’d escaped to back rooms of my self
but still I find thoughts of you stacked on a shelf
carefully obscured both in front and above
by other less perilous memories of love.
You walk nonchalantly into the room
that I have just cleared with a cloth and a broom
of other dangers and sadnesses not
knowing that once again, I will be caught.
Now I hide out behind walls at the back
where all of my worst fears reside in a stack.
Cowering here as you stride through the place
that your very presence has turned dark and base.
How could I have loved such a frightening soul,
the box of my heart turned into a bowl
with all of my secrets and weakness revealed—
things I now know that I should have kept sealed?
There you sit quietly, perched on a chair,
one hand on the desk top, one hand on your hair,
writing cruel words—I know about me.
I ease my way over, hoping to see,
but the paper is empty. Your ink has turned clear,
making improbable all that I fear.
As now I remember that I let you in,
forgetting all else in the charm of your grin.
The joy of your hand as it guided me sure
across the dance floor—all that allure
that kept me involved in the surface of you
overlooking the risks as most of us do.
If I’d had an x-ray taken of you
when our romance was shiny and new
I might have seen sooner your dangerous zone
and taken a detour and left you alone.
And perhaps now my dreams would be placid and calm
so I’d sleep without worry, sleep without qualm.
I might not have moved off to the edge of the world,
might still have been sleeping, never unfurled.
Perhaps it’s these dangers that make us let go
of all of the comforts of worlds that we know
and send us out elsewhere to discover a self
we’d have never found sitting safe on a shelf.
Written on the topic of risk for dVerse Poets.
Foxtail
We live in a modular world, things changing around us so fast that what we once thought we’d always remember can pass in a blur. We come together and we part, now close, now remote, castoff too fast to really memorize each other so that years later, we half-remember by a certain picture in the mind, a passing scent, a strain of music. Something. There was something special. Half-grasped, caught like a foxtail in our mind.
Prompt words are castoff, together, modular, blur and remote. Image by Emmy M on Unsplash.
Random Orders
When our builder said that “It’s terribly good“
as he showed us the shipment of rainforest wood,
I, for one, uttered a silent scream,
for how could I okay this endangered beam?
In like manner, when he presented the door
of yew, it elicited a quiet roar.
So instead, he then showed us a genuine fake—
some laminate made for ecology’s sake
out of plastic and sawdust fused by black light.
Okay, I’m confused. Is night day and day night?
When we asked him for details and asked him to give
us a price for this place we were hoping to live,
he gave us one total, then he gave us a few.
An exact estimate seemed the best he could do.
As if, in his string of incessant banality,
all he could offer was ultimate reality.
my husband and I are both loyal opponents
of phrases with contradictory components.
So his exact estimate clearly confused.
It was plain that the language was being abused.
When our sawyer tried selling us a smaller half
of a board for our wall shelf, I gave a small laugh.
with passive aggression, I played the wise fool.
Was this our only choice? For this was not cool.
At first just amused, in the end we were sad,
for these oxymorons were driving us mad.
Surely these word games were only a fad.
Kids in cliques may mean good when they say it is bad,
but we were adults here and now on the brink
of retiring somewhere to have a stiff drink.
A close distance away was a favorite bar
with a mean martini served in a jar.
We gave random orders for olives and gin,
telling the barkeep what shape we were in.
Then, heads swimming with opposites, we didn’t scrimp.
We told the waiter to bring jumbo shrimp!
Word prompts today are sawyer, clique, oxymoron, fad and give. In case it wasn’t obvious, I took the prompt word “oxymoron” to excess. All of the highlighted words are oxymorons (self-contradictory phrases.)
Act Three
The echo of your footsteps as you trod across my mind
creates anticipation of a nostalgic kind.
You elevate my consciousness as you were wont to do
and so in time I manifest the whole grand rest of you.
You’ve been a silent tenant for so many years
that this surprise appearance prompts again those tears
I thought had been dried up in me when you had to go
to that place where you were drawn by the undertow.
For only a brief moment, we are as we have been,
’til with a click of memory, I banish you again.
You slip back into shadow in the attic of my mind,
where both of us lie tangled, hopelessly entwined.
I come back to the present while you’re banished to the past,
once again resuming the roles in which we’re cast.
You imprisoned in act two, caught eternally
while I assume a solo role, living out act three.
Prompt words today are elevate, echo, click, tenant and cross.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 