Bar Stool Brush-Off
There’s not a ghost of a chance
that you’ll crack my code,
free-wheeling know-it-all
that you are.
But as your hand smooths
that errant strand of hair
back into its perfect place,
I’ll hand you this:
every time you check your reflection
in the mirror behind the bar,
it is clear no number of looks
will clue you in to yourself.
The prompt for dVerse Poets is “Reflection.”
jdb photo
Longing
This morning’s church bells’ constant bongings
woke me to familiar longings.
Coded as they were in dreams,
when I awoke, they split their seams
and spilled into my conscious thought.
Futile to yearn for what I’m not.
No longer young or lithe or trim,
no passions spilling from my brim.
No husband, mother, father, lover.
No guardians to watch and hover.
I’ve grown away from most of life,
connections severed as with a knife.
Still, I do not long for these.
I do not pray on bended knees
for what is past or what is lost,
for I know pining’s pain and cost.
My longing, now, is just to see
what life’s plot is left to me.
For Lens Artists Chanllenge, the prompt is “Longing.”
New Boss
Lately, the ladies room at work echoes with gripes and sobs
and we’re checking out the classifieds for new potential jobs.
Our boss’s son is our new boss and though he has his genes,
he doesn’t seem to have his heart. He treats us like machines.
And even though his resume may brand him as auspicious,
our office staff is feeling rather doleful and suspicious.
It’s his frosty cold demeanor that has us feeling lost.
If only he’d thaw out, we’d be more willing to be bossed!
For MVB: the prompt is “New.”
Minds
like mine
are bound to
slip away into the
swells, blown away
through cracks in time
to where a poem dwells.
Fans of verse may lure me
into sitting on a fence picking
bones of words that together make
no sense. I sort them into towers, then
grasp more words to build trapped words
in frosted pyramids with messages well-chilled.
The Sunday Whirl words are: bound slip swells fan luring fence cracks bone tower frosted trap grasps
The photo, taken by me, is of a snow-covered venting volcano.
The Indigestibles
No room for mushrooms, can’t live with liver.
The thought of brains just makes me shiver.
Though I like pizza, my other law
is I don’t eat tomatoes raw!
Drinking milk’s against my wishes.
Fish is simply for the fishes.
I eat no veal or other baby,
and steak for me is simply “maybe.”
So if it’s your plan to invest
in things that I like to ingest,
I won’t make it any harder
for you to come and stock my larder.
All else you want to bring to feed me—
what edibles you wish to cede me:
Injera, curries, Thai, Chinese—
all are sure to tempt and please.
Except for one thing I just thought of
that in the past I’ve had a lot of.
There’s one more mouthful I won’t try.
I have no taste for humble pie!
For RDP, the prompt word is Mushroom.
Open Hand
Wings held lightly without crushing
survive to join the world’s wild rushing,
while love held by a tight-clenched fist
quells half our reason to exist.
Some laud passions most rapacious—
grasping, volatile, tenacious;
but this is not the love I feel.
I do not seek to swoon or reel.
The tenacity of a skin tight glove
might stay my soaring to heights above.
I need your love like an open hand.
Not for me the wedding band.
The bond I seek from you, my dear,
is not the gauntlet that I fear
but rather, fingers whose sensations
are left free to life’s elations.
Butterflies kept in a jar
lose that beauty seen from afar.
That grace of movement caught on air
is what makes their beauty rare.
I love it when your arms enfold,
but if you love me, loose your hold.
The measure of my tenacity
is that I’ll come back to thee.
jdbphoto
The SOCS prompt is “Hand.”
The SOCS prompt is “Hand.”
Full Moon Indictment
The moon is just your implement, dismantling my defenses.
It rattles my conviction, plays havoc with my senses.
What is it in the moonlight that lowers my resistance?
It seems to swell to its full power just at your insistence.
For dVerse Poets, we are to write a poem about the moon. To see other responses to the prompt, go HERE.
Self Portrait
I am trying to escape the menagerie—
all those selves I hold in front of me
as well as the ones I have let escape.
Those that run ahead—
the ones that are my future selves—
are here, hidden in the portrait that you see.
Domineering, perhaps. But seasoned with
an awareness of what might have produced
all of the parts of myself I try to rein in.
This has created a certain slowness to connect.
The natural is seasoned with a desire to honor dreams
of what I hope to be. When I look in the mirror,
I see them all: my mother and my grandmother
and my sisters. We demand, are stubborn.
Sometime we are martyrs, stifling tears.
Then suddenly, I pass them by like memories
of nightmares: all the anxiety attacks,
illnesses and heartbreak.
We are all wonderful performers,
using bad luck to fuel good.
The belles of our own ball,
we push back the grim news
of what we fear we really are.
Headstrong, we reach for what we can be.
Utterly addicted to change,
Tony or no Tony,
we are the stars of our own lives.
For dVerse Poets.
The Excuse
It is those times
over dinner
when we have lifted a glass
or two—
those times
without husbands, who are home
watching a game
or out with gun and skeet—
those times
with long-ago college schemes
or scandals
remembered—
when, although no longer hungry,
we nonetheless order a dessert
with three forks
as an excuse to linger.
For Monday Poetry Prompt, the prompt is “excuse.”
Since I have written around 4,000 poems for this blog, I have lately started searching to see how many of the prompt words have been used in an earlier poem. I couldn’t resist doing so for “sundae,” thinking this might be the one word I’d never used before, but it actually came up in 4. This is the one I chose:
Sixteen!! The Combiners (Excerpt)
This is an excerpt from a longer narrative poem in my book, Prairie Moths. It is the final section of “The Combiners” –a poem about the itinerant workers who would drive up from Oklahoma each summer to harvest the wheat crop in South Dakota. This infusion of fresh young men into a town of just 700 people was, of course, exciting to teenaged girls whose own male classmates were a bit immature. Not that any of us ever did anything about it. Imagining and talking was enough for us at the age of sixteen!
The Combiners
I saw him first on the bleachers
on the other side of the floor.
As dancers came together and parted,
I saw him and then didn’t see him.
After the music stopped, I craned my neck
around the legs that stood in front of me,
trying to see him across the cleared dance floor.
Then the voice at the top of the legs
asked me to dance, and I looked up–at him.
Feeling uncertain, wicked and wild,
I answered yes.
I’d served him once or twice
at Restaurant 16–
that highway-fronting restaurant
as exotic as its name.
I knew he was working the Weston place
with an outfit my dad had never used.
He liked his steak well-done,
French dressing, no tomatoes.
Butterscotch sundaes made him cough.
Over the water pitcher and order pad,
we had traded a look or two.
I knew he wore Old Spice
and drank Cokes with breakfast,
but I didn’t know his name.
When we got to the dance floor,
he took my hand,
put his other hand on my damp waist.
It was a slow dance and the night was hot.
The dance was work.
I was awkward–too inhibited to get as intimate
as following in dancing requires.
Over the music, we tried to shout our names,
tried to find a mutual rhythm,
finally giving up both endeavors
to dance the slow song, not touching,
moving our arms in fast song 60’s style
to the slow song rhythms.
When the music stopped,
he walked me back again
to the bleacher
he had plucked me from,
reinserted me into the correct space in the line of girls,
smiled, and walked away.
My friends closed around me
like a sensitive plant
to hear the news.
I watched his back,
blue short-sleeved shirt,
his pressed Levis
and his cowboy boots.
I watched the Oklahoma swing of his hips–
danger on the hoof.
He wouldn’t ask me to dance again,
yet, his sun-blackened arms,so finely muscled,
had held me for a minute or two.
His bleached blue eyes
had seen something of worth in me.
He had asked my name, touched my waist,
and walked me off the dance floor.
And, since this was as spicy
as any of our stories would likely be
all summer long,
I turned to my friends to tell the tale.
The Word of the Day prompt is “Sundae.”
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 