Category Archives: Poem

Kissing Frogs

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Kissing Frogs

If you blow on a warty frog, he’ll worship you for life,
and if you are a princess, he might make you his wife.
Of course it won’t be easy with an amphibian beau,
for you’re sure to draw attention everywhere you go.
Although you’ll be very high and he’ll be extremely low,
as you hop along together, he’s bound to find you slow.
He won’t be good at dancing for with that tiny bod on him,
it will be a certainty that some dancer will trod on him.

A certain growth of character is a prerequisite
for any royal daughter to go along with it.
Your kids would be unusual for though a son or daughter
would excel at feats like swimming in the water,
when it came to royal functions, their gooses would be cooked,
for in any ceremony, they’d be overlooked.
So it’s all right to blow on frogs, to kiss them or to carry them,
but if you are a princess, it is best that you don’t marry them!

Prompts for today are blow, worship, warty, prerequisite and growth.

Hopscotch Flunky

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Hopscotch Flunky

When I hop on one foot, I am destined to fall.
Too much scotch and less hop is the cause of it all.
When they said toss the rock, I threw out my ice.
Any shock that I haven’t been asked to play twice?

The dVerse Poets prompt today is to write a poem in anapestic tetrameter

Stopping by Robert Frost on an Early Morning

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Thanks, NaPoWriMo, for making my poem one of the featured poems yesterday.  The NaPoWriMo prompt today  was to write a poem that responds, in some way, to another poem.
I chose “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. Here is my poem. A link to his original is given below my poem. It is the first and only time, I think, that I’ll get top billing over Robert Frost!

Stopping by Robert Frost on an Early Morning

Whose poem this is I think I know,
yet know not where I’m going to go,
so glad I am that he won’t see
my page fill up with parody.

My next-door neighbors must think it queer
at six o’clock I’m in full gear
here on my perch above the lake,
dispelling darkness, this poem to make.

I jog my mind to try to shake
some fruitful thoughts out, then I take
and peel the gatherings of my  mind
to seek the flesh within the rind.

This creative state lies deep
between consciousness and sleep.
Each day our rendezvous I keep,
then share the poems that I reap.

 

See Robert Frost’s poem HERE.

Cowboy on an Off-White Charger (Prompts and NaPoWriMo 2021 day 22)

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Cowboy on an Off-White Charger

You say I’m queen of your affection, yet your ambit has grown larger.
I hear you’ve put some extra miles on your faithful charger.
You say she is exhausted, her endurance sorely taxed.
She may need reshoeing and your credit card is maxed.

The extent of your travels and the speed with which you charge
have lately increased greatly—to have doubled, by and large.
If our love’s become monotonous, perhaps you seek new favors.
Perhaps you choose to taste delights of various other flavors.

You say your boots are dusty and nonchalantly stroll
out to find a shoeshine boy to cleanse your dirty sole.
Yet what you seek to polish may be a point that’s moot.
I think that what needs polishing may not be a boot.

Prompt words today are dusty boots, monotonous, ambit, speed and queen. The NaPoWriMo prompt today discussed different poetic devices. In lieu of just using one of them, I decided to try to use metonymy, polysemy, synecdoche and metalepsis in one poem. Image by Karen Cantu on Unsplash, used with permission.

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.