Category Archives: Poem

Bothersome Friends: dVerse Poets

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Bothersome Friends

I can’t be bothered caring about the way I dress.
I wear my clothes in wrinkles and my hairdo is a mess.
I don’t file my ragged nails. My cuticles are snaggy,
and please don’t bother telling me my pants seat is too baggy.

The only thing that bothers me is folks who are persnickety––
who adjust my collar, smooth my tie or pick at me.
If only they’d leave me alone to be who I am.
Why obsess about my looks when I don’t give a damn? 

 

 

The dVerse Poets prompt today is to write a “bother” poem. Image from Unsplash by Daniel Pascoa, used with permission.

Tyrant: NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 19: The Rant

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Tyrant

Your arguments are specious, without a gram of proof,
but when we try to point this out, you only seem aloof.
Though you fancy that you’ve sex appeal and charm and woo and sizzle,
your expected rain of compliments turns out to be a drizzle.

That odor you find fragrant with which you mask your stench
would not be necessary if you were just a mensch*,
but the bald reality that you need to face
is that most of your actions are selfish, rude and base.

All your resolutions sworn to in the past
were but fabrications never meant to last.
In short, you are a narcissist thinking of you alone
with a thousand selfish vanities for which you won’t atone.

That’s why, my dear, you sit there in your ivory tower
wondering why your riches, your accomplishments and power
somehow do not satisfy when done for yourself only,
for all your grand accomplishments just leave you feeling lonely.

*mensch: a person of integrity and honor

The NaPoWriMo prompt today is to write a humorous rant. In this poem, you may excoriate to your heart’s content all the things that get on your nerves.
Prompts today are sizzle, fragrant, past, specious and reality.images from Unsplash, used with permission

The Graffiti Artist

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Graffiti Artist

Such errands as having to go to the store
to get milk for one’s mother can be a big bore.
Then I spot a blank wall that alters my view
of what I’ve been sent to the corner to do.

My mind shifts a cog and memory grows faint
as I forget the milk and instead buy spray paint.
I’ve abandoned my purpose and lost my perspective
to scrawl on the wall these words of invective.

It’s not that my sentiments are hocus-pocus.
It’s simply that I have shifted my focus.
I don’t prevaricate, for though they’re ruthless,
let it not be said that my statements are truthless.

What some see as defacement, others see as art,
but this is never my goal from the start.
When I have a thought, I just want to share it.
Some put it on T-shirts and then choose to wear it,

but I want it bigger. I have to shout.
My feelings require a wall to get out!
So please look at the message and if you must blame
someone for graffiti, just look at the name

of the politician that I am exposing
for graft and corruption or lying or posing.
He’s the real villain. I’m only the one
who’s revolting with spray paint instead of a gun!!!

Prompt words for today are prevaricate, focus, abandoned, scrawl and perspective. All photos of graffiti thanks to Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Massage: NaPoWriMo 2021, Apr. 18

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The Massage

On the table in the peaceful room,
I  wait  to see what this new creator will make of me.
I  experience a virtual reality–
each stage of her touch
a different story.
Body and soul, I am
the medium for her message: the massage.

Standing over the table in the stove-warmed room,
she is the cook.  I am the bread dough she is kneading. 
My leg is a green onion
having its outer skins pulled gently off.

In  the very warm, peaceful, quiet  room,
her fingers knead and fold,
rocking  my separate parts into
one whole ball of clay.
There is artistry in her touch as she folds my left arm
out  like a wing, then in like a handle,
and I am well on my way toward being a teapot
as she forms  my right  arm into the spout.

In the quiet room gone back in time,
I am Dad in his easy chair after a long day mowing hay,
saying, “Rub Pa’s head.” 
She is me, scratching  fingers through his hair
kindly, lovingly, with just the right amount of vigor.

On the table in the warm room,
I am hot taffy being pulled by the well-buttered hands
of four little snowbound girls
In Clara Brost’s kitchen.

From this room now expanding,
I am stretched by her fingers through both space and time.
She is sea brine. I am protoplasm,
buffeted back and forth,
and when at the end she cups my ear,
I can hear the ocean 
As from a shell.

The NaPoWriMo 2021 prompt for April 18 was  to write a poem based on the title of one of the chapters from Susan G. Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words.The one I chose was “Poems and the Body.”

Bobcat

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Bobcat

You stroll across the road in front of us
as though you do not notice us.
Astonished, we capitulate our right of way
and sit in the car, digesting our wonder
at your incursion into this tame neighborhood
spread like a blanket
over the wildness of the desert.

It is no wonder
that life in this place
seems to be laden
with occasional visits
of rattlesnakes and bobcats
such as yourself,
but it is by chance that,
like a brief vacation from our own banality,
we bear witness to your incursion.

Even given your languid stroll,
I cannot move quickly enough to record it,
but providence provides,
and minutes after we pull into the garage and come inside,
an email arrives from the neighbor
that records your incursion
into his backyard.

He stalked you with his camera,
and we with our eyes
as you strolled serenely
in between your own stalkings.

Oh, bobcat,
beautiful element
of that wild nature that surrounds
and enriches us
and which, in spite of
evidence to the contrary,
we are a part of—

If I were religious,
these words
of your sighting
would be my prayer.

Prompts today are chance, capitulate, digest, lade and astonished. Photo by Paul Brown. Thanks, Paul, for capturing what I could only try to capture in words. Photo taken on Friday afternoon, April 16, 2021. Location: Trilogy at Vistancia, Peoria, Arizona.

Nocturne: NaPoWriMo 2021, April 17

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Nocturne

With half a life lived in the dark,
an owl’s hoot, an answering bark,
the moon across the water scattered,
ragged clouds, wispy and battered,

I float in night and solitude,
the night determining my mood.
I lie in darkness and I brood,
a momentary interlude.

When sunlight comes in fits and starts,
The day brings out my other parts.
They rise in me from dawn to noon,
dispelling powers of the moon.

Thus balanced between dark and light,
each half consumes its daily bite.
I welcome each within its time—
life varied, balanced and sublime.

For Day 17 of NaPoWriMo, we are to write a poem about the moon.

Poetic Research

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Poetic Research

My dictionary slips off its perch,
so I leave it lie and ask Google to search
for the meaning of “farctate,” a word that sounds farty
when what I had wished for was words far more arty.
But I find even after it’s screened,
I forget to remember what I have gleaned.
Then, when I check “precept” to see if its meaning
is what I think, I find it demeaning
that I have to check and do not just know,
but in the end, I am right on, and so,
I get to the task and I screw up my lips
and type out this poem without any slips.
Still and all, don’t we wish they made prompt words more easy,
so we could pursue them without feeling queasy?

Prompt words today are register, lips, farctate, precept and search. Definition of “farctate” copied from the Merriam Webster Dictionary.

The Blooming Desert

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The Blooming Desert

Jeeze, Louise!!!!!
Is that your sneeze
that filled this little desert room,
louder than a sonic boom,
and not, in fact, the house collapsing?
Just your allergies relapsing?

More than just a sniff or sneeze—
Not the slightest little breeze,
but one that brings one to one’s knees,
and makes polar icecaps unfreeze!
Although we love the blooming clover,
would that its flowering was soon over.

The palo verde and barrel cactus
have tended to over-impact us.
Morning glory and prickly pear
have proven more than we can bear.
As beauteous as they are, I fear,
what pleases eye just tortures ear!!!

 

Click on flowers to enlarge.

For NaPoWriMo (Not to prompt, I’m afraid.) I woke up with the first four lines of this poem in my head and they pulled me in after them to write this little impromptu poem. Also, for Cee’s FOTD.

Gimme Some Skin! (NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 16)

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Gimme Some Skin!

There’s no outside on
a skeleton—
simply bone
and bone alone.

Bones have no skin
to put them in—
no human hide
to hide inside.

They’re never pimply
for they’re simply
lacking places
on their faces
for a zit
to find to sit.

It’s not a matter of conjecture
what will be the state and texture
of their cheeks, for we all know
a blemish has no place to go.

So do not waste your Retinol
on a body with no skin at all.
It would be a horrid waste
on a skull that is de-faced!

For NaPoWriMom Day 16, we are to write a Skeltonic, or tumbling, verse. In this form, there’s no specific number of syllables per line, but each line should be short, and should aim to have two or three stressed syllables. And the lines should rhyme. You just rhyme the same sound until you get tired of it, and then move on to another sound.

Praying Mantis

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(Click on photos to enlarge and see details.)


Praying Mantis

Now that the sun has vanished and the desert air turned cold,
some of the insects vanish, but others have turned bold.
Small winged gnats bask under the lamplight’s surrogate sun.
Motionless, they seem to sleep, their daylight flitters done.
They colonize the body of the terrace table lamp,
sunning in the bulb’s bright glow, absorbing every amp. 
A single different visitor ascends my sister’s back,
as though he seeks the warmth and light the night air seems to lack.

She does not feel his presence. So far, he’s brought no harm.
He spreads out on the blanket of her light-warmed arm.
More stick-with-arms than insect, he seems inclined to stay.
Secure in his establishment, it seems as though he may
settle there for good, but then he chooses to decamp
by making an impromptu leap onto the terrace lamp.
Motionless, as though caught up in silent meditation,
nothing seems to interrupt his profound cogitation.

But then he leaps up higher, closer to the light,
the globe’s gleam growing warmer at this greater height.
The smaller denizens of light seem calm and unperturbed.
They continue slumbers largely undisturbed,
but suddenly I notice their numbers have diminished,
the mantis washing off his arms as though he has just finished.
He draws one and then another arm through his lethal jaws,
as though they’re violin bows moving without pause.

His music has no volume. The sawing of his bows
creates no funeral music.  No sins do they expose.
For awhile he stands unmoving, the heat and light ideal
for aiding his digestion of his midnight meal.
The moon cuts through the darkness, dividing it in layers
as the unmoving mantis seems to say his prayers.
Then, when he leaps into the dark, I turn out the light
and trundle off to bed as well, bidding you good night.

 

Prompts today are insect, impromptu, establishment, trundle and cold.