Category Archives: Poem

Solitary Interlude

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Solitary Interlude

The luxury of time alone.
No lapses for which to atone.
No tasks assigned. No obligations.
Only personal tribulations.
No one to answer to or for.
A bolted gate. A locked front door.
No need to dress or comb my hair.
Leaving my room, no one is there.

Company is glorious,
but, alas, laborious.
The same is true of visiting.
A bird that’s always on the wing
has no time to enjoy her nest.
I leave it up to you what’s best—
company or solitude?
Activity or quietude?

I am no hermit. I crave no den.
I love the places where I’ve been.
A bit of each is what I’d choose.
Sometimes one and sometimes twos.
But as for now, I must declare,
my guest room empty with no one there
gives me the perfect company:
one-on-one, myself and me.

Eulogy for Artichokes

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Eulogy for Artichokes

Behold the bristly artichokes scattered through the field—
delicious little thistles when boiled, buttered, peeled.
With our taste buds wakened and when they’re salted slightly,
it takes a bit of discipline to try to eat politely.

Leaf by leaf, we peel them bare, scraping off their meat.
We like them better with each tiny bit of them we eat.
Then scraping off the “chokey” part, we gobble down the heart.
They told us all along that this would be our favorite part.

Who knew these fat green pinecones would turn out to be so tasty?
Now we wish consumption of them hadn’t been so hasty.
And even after plates are bare and not a morsel lingers,
we’d like to slurp the butter up and lick it from our fingers.

 

Prompts for the day are scattered, field, discipline, bristly and wake. Image by Margaret Jaszowski on Unsplash.

The Watchers

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The Watchers

Is deja vu imagined or is it re-dreamed dreams—
time as we have lived it leaking at the seams?
Perhaps time is a magnet that draws in all our years
like a solar plexus for all our hopes and fears.

Perhaps it teams together with the universe
presenting itself over so we can rehearse
the choices that we’re given and choose a different course—
one that fate rebels against, another to endorse.

The chance of this may stupefy, for man in his confusion
is prone to make a science out of his delusion.
But forces we know little of perhaps control it all.
They have us in their balance, weighing out our fall.

Prompts for today are deja vu, magnet, stupify, plexus and force.

 

An Avid Fetcher’s Soliloquy

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My house’s front door.

Click on photos to enlarge.

An Avid Fetcher’s Soliloquy

Whose house this is I so well know.
She’s swinging in the hammock, though.
I think she came to catch some zzzs,
not for a Scottie on her knees,
but still, I charm her with my eyes
and my bigger brother vies

to win attention and her pats,
but I want something else, and that’s
a tennis ball thrown just for me.
I drop it now beside her knee.
She reaches out and throws it up
and I’m a very happy pup

as I race to go retrieve it
knowing that she will receive it
once again, and then again,
for that’s the way it’s always been
ever since I can remember,
mom compliant, me so limber

that sometimes I catch that round
ball before it hits the ground.
and though her left arm’s occupied
with scratching Diego’s tough hide,
her right arm is my provenance,
and so I bark and jump and dance,

encouraging throw after throw
so I can follow where they go,
and when at night I go to sleep,
upon my dog bed, burrowing deep,
I pray the God of dogs protects
mom’s throwing arm from all defects.

For dVerse poets, the prompt is to write a soliloquy.

I wrote this one on International Dogs Day, Aug 16, 2021.
Thanks to Victoria Slotto for pointing that out to me.

The Human Race

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The Human Race

Our world keeps tripping over its own tangled shoelaces,
one generation tying them up, the next heedlessly
rushing ahead in wondrous greed until it trips, falls,
and stops again to tighten its laces.

Today goes for the throat of yesterday,
bemoaning its tardiness
in choking off the past
while rushing ahead in a blind race.

In a constant state of pregnancy,
one generation gives birth to the next,
standing and tripping and falling in turn
like an automaton marching ahead to its own destruction.

Prompt words are throat, tangled shoelaces, wondrous, tardy and pregnancy.

Not in the Cards (An Art Dealer’s Lament)

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Not in the Cards
(An Art Dealer’s Lament)

I hear your family reads tea leaves and
can tell the future from a hand.
And it’s been said that being mystic
tends to make one altruistic;
but insufficient evidence
exists in proof of this and hence,
moving forward, I must state
it is a truth I must debate.

Your sister’s painting of the farm
shows some skill, a certain charm,
with animals in states of grace
which normally is not the case.
Stallion, bantam rooster, steer
are not the best of friends, I fear.
And that pig you lately ate
likely knew its horrid fate.

I’ve no need to excoriate
your peaceful kingdom, but of late
realism is the trend
in the paintings that I vend.
It’s clear your sister did not foresee
what my response was going to be,
for her depictions of rural glee
are not the canvasses for me.

Prompt words today are altruistic, farm, canvas, forward, insufficient.

Puddle-Jumping in the Rain: Wordle 515, The Sunday Whirl Aug 22, 2021

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Puddle-Jumping in the Rain

A surge of wind predicts the storm,
blows in the clouds, dispels the warm.

One dry gust sends blinds to swinging
and in the eaves commences singing,

billows drapes, blows open doors,
spreads leaves on counters and on floors.

Soon the rain masks land and sky
as the whole world begins to cry,

fashioning a different role
for each ditch or deep pot hole.

Children scurry home from school
earlier than is the rule

to tug on boots over their feet
and splash through puddles in the street.

These stompings in the driving rain
earn their mothers’ deep disdain.

Mud caked on leggings, jeans and coats,
remnants of ramblings through moats,

oceans, rivers, seas and streams—
all the faux waterways it seems

kids are drawn to in a gale
and moms forbid to no avail.

 

Prompts for the Sunday Whirl Wordle Prompt are: role, surge, fashion, gust, dry, send, children, masks, storm, and counter

Perpetual Kid

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Perpetual Kid

My little brother was hard to tie down,
and after his rambles through country and town,
hangry and dirty, he plopped in a chair,
and enclosed in his pants cuffs and stuck in his hair
were tree leaves and grass stalks and pollen from flowers
that accompanied him home after hours and hours
of wandering aimless inspecting the world
where all of the wonders of life were unfurled.

A junior adventurer, he would not change.
Even grown up, his travels would range
from border to border as yearly he tended
to follow adventures that never have ended.
From China to Africa, from pole to pole,
to see the whole earth has become his goal.
Yet year after year, when he’s through he comes home
where his sister is waiting with cook pot and comb
to fill up his tummy and clean the man up.
For in every lone wolf remains traces of pup!

 

Prompts for today are ramble, hangry, enclosed, tend and junior.

The Refusal

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The Refusal

Though you seek to amuse me, instead I’m aghast
when you stir up these tales from your vagabond past—
how you set out with no education
upon a path with no destination.

When you tell what you did when down on your luck—
what you’d do for a dime or a quarter or buck—
I don’t want involvement with one of your kind—
one who’ll do anything, caught in a bind.

How can you think that your tales of abusing,
of wooing, beguiling and loving and using
could be aphrodisiac is hard to see.
They only insure your next victim’s not me.

So I’ll say ta-ta, au revoir and so long.
I won’t be a lyric in any sad song,
and when I dress up in wedding apparel,
I’ll make sure my groom is a good deal less feral.

 

Prompt words are aghast, amuse, destination, involve and quarter. Illustration by Uyen Nguyen on Unsplash.

Tactical Failure

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Tactical Failure

Cream whipped up frothy as air smothering chocolate cake—
how much more temptation is my rival going to make?
She knows that my true love is fond of skinny hips,
and yet she makes confections she knows will tempt my lips.

Tiny marzipan cherries adorn the cookies that
she knows that I will not resist and that they’ll make me fat.
She wants to exacerbate a rift she knows is there
ever since as a surprise I cut my knee-length hair.

His complaints resounded over the neighborhood.
Everyone heard his distress, so I’m sure she could
as she passed by on the sidewalk, walking very slow
on her way to the juke joint where they both liked to go.

I know she had designs on him for the very next day
she brought three dozen cookies lined up neatly on a tray.
They were for consolation for she knew we were in trouble,
and so she baked me cookies and made the frosting double.

Thus did this vixen hasten my love affair’s demise
by appealing to my weakness and doubling my size.
And thus because her tactics seemed so perfectly to work,
I wound up with a sweet life while she would up with a jerk! 

Prompts today are frothy as air, exacerbate, marzipan, resound and joint.