Category Archives: Poem

Mall Mode

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Mall Mode

Shopping malls and market finds are sites of great commotion.
They thrive on hype and slick techniques and tactics of promotion.

They are keen on chicanery that brings you in to buy.
You simply cannot wait to get your portion of the pie.

Pizza Huts and Burger Kings vie for your attention
if you seek a little break to ease the shopping tension.

But you must know the lingo that goes with hot new styles.
The modern world depends on more than simply fashion’s wiles.

When you see a friend’s dope shoes as well as her new hat,
you know enough to call them goat and not to call them phat.

Prompts today are market finds, keen, technique, chicanery and promotion. I might even try to squeeze in some prompts from Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Her prompts today are: “hat,”  “hit,” “hot,” and “hut.” Image by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash, used with permission.

Lift

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Click on photos to enlarge.


Lift

You burn the air with tail and wing,
not thinking about anything.

Each lift of pinion simple, sure,
anonymous, unplanned and pure.

No slipshod planning, everything
insures facility of wing.

Each barb, each shaft composed with care
made less of matter than of air.

We only guess. We do not know,
what hand has engineered it so,

 merely wonder at its might
as we watch your easy flight,

lifting up with ease most rare
by miracle of wing on air.

 

Prompt words today are burn, simple, slipshod and wing.

Feeding Frenzy

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Feeding Frenzy

When I hear footsteps on the roof I do not ever worry,
even though they’re rapid as though someone’s in a hurry,
there is no burglar kneeling there waiting to rob my vault.
If there are noises overhead, it is my kitty’s fault.

The loot she seeks is kibble. She cannot stand the fact
that I am so heedless and have so little tact
that I feed dogs before the cats, and yet she doesn’t dare
venture into the backyard, for canines quarter there.

 


The fact of my investment in the solid gate
that keeps dogs from the cats’ domain does not expiate
the sin that I have chosen to feed the doggies first.
Of all my pet decisions, she thinks this is the worst.

 


So from the rooftop far above where dog types cannot reach,
the girl cat feels the need to stand there daily to impeach
my decision, once again, and let me know her wishes
for soft cat food and dry cat food in their separate dishes.

And once the dogs are fed, we race—her up there, me below,
and however quickly I happen to go,
she always beats me in the race to get to the back door
where I rip one food pouch open and she meows for more.

 


While her brother digs into juicy tuna souffle,
grateful for just one dish of this easy prey,
she looks up accusingly from her feline crouch,
and now and then I heed her plea and yield the extra pouch.

 

 

 

Prompts today are on the roof, fault, loot, kneel and investment.

Concrete Poem

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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

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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

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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”

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“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

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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

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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

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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.