Category Archives: Poem

“To Do” List for a New Roommate (NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 9 and Daily Prompts)

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“To Do” List for a New Roommate

*If you value this abode,
please plan to shoulder half the load
to keep it lovely, clean and neat.
This rule, I will not repeat.

*Underwear should not be seen
on chair or floor or in-between.
(To insure I’m a happy camper,
dirty clothes go in the hamper.)

*If, on occasion, you feel you might
have a lover spend the night,
lest my ire you might incite,
please have him leave by morning light.

*No mongrels, kittens, fish or birds
or other denizens of herds
may cross my doorway, now or ever.
In short, are pets allowed? No. Never!!!

*If personal details you recite,
please insure they are not trite,
for next to messiness and snoring,
I most dread roommates who are boring.

* Don’t steal my cookies or my chips.
My food should never pass your lips.
Don’t steal my leftover knishes,
and when you cook, do your own dishes.

*If these requests you can’t abide,
just pack your bags and move outside!
Follow my rules, or it’s your loss,
for in this house, I am the boss!

 

Prompt words today are shoulder, underwear, mongrel, trite and love.  Image by Sincerely Media on Unsplash. Used with permission. 

Also, for NaPoWriMo, Day 9, Make a To-Do List

“Don’t” NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 7

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Don’t

Who can love
a bit of sweetness
so lacking
at its heart
that it’s more not there than there?
A donut lover!

The prompt for Day 7 of NaPoWriMo is to write a shadorma. Image by Matt Walsh on Unsplash, used with permission.

The shadorma is a six-line, 26-syllable poem. The syllable count by line is 3/5/3/3/7/5. So, like the haiku, the lines are relatively short.

 

Paper Star

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Paper Star

Born to a family with great clout,
endued with fame, there was no doubt
she, too, would take the world by storm.
Yet, she went against the norm.

Coached in wit and charm and fame,
she didn’t want to play the game.
Sure of herself, without a doubt,
she felt no need to preen or flout.

She renounced usage of the name
and chose a lifestyle much more tame.
Given a choice, selected knowledge,
studied hard and went to college.

Took lifelong sabbatical
from being brash or radical.
Did not grace the silver screen.
Lived out her life private, unseen.

Avoided fame and tabloid papers,
forwent scandal, Oscars, capers.
Became a mother and a wife.
Gave up fame, but had a life.

Word prompts today are radical, coach, usage, endue and doubt. Image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

Line of Reasoning

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Line of Reasoning

His baleful eye and mawkish grin
reveal the sort of state he’s in.
Anybody can see he wields
an attitude that never yields
to any view different from his.
He’s up on everybody’s biz.
On world matters bacterial
and all things managerial
he knows more than the experts do
and gladly shares his point of view
with doctor, scientist or crew.
He’ll educate them all anew
by sharing truths that only he
in his superiority
has figured out. He is so clever
that even though, in truth, he never
went to university,
still, surely, all the world can see
it’s simply common sense that how
he sees things is a sacred cow.
In fact, you need not go to school.
Just listen to this puffed-up fool
to hear how science has it wrong.
He’s known the true facts all along.
How much more proof is there to get?
He heard it on the Internet!

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from people’s inability to recognize their lack of ability.

Prompt words today are bacterial, crew, mawkish, wield and anybody. Image by brandi ibraho on Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

Inside My Sister’s Mind

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For NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 6, the prompt is: Go to a book you love. Find a short line that strikes you. Make that line the title of your poem. Write a poem inspired by the line. Then, after you’ve finished, change the title completely.

The line I chose was “Not all those who wander are lost.” from —The Lord of the Rings by  J.R.R. Tolkein. This is the poem that resulted. The quote in the last line of the poem is from the title character in Hamlet, by Wm. Shakespeare.

                    Inside My Sister’s Mind

In my life, sometimes,
when I was farthest from knowing where I was,
I was the closest to finding myself.

Is this how it is
for those who wander
the countless corridors of dementia?
Do they encounter themselves,
                   again and again,
unstuck from time?

Do our constant attempts to bring them back 
              hamper their journeys,
       start them over again,
frustratingly?

Every road we travel
need not be the same road—straight and chronological.
            Dreams teach us that.
                                           Unstick us.
Put our minds in the clouds to float
          hors d’oeuvres of memory,

                                   a bite           here
                  and a bite           there.

Who are we to try to attempt to force feed an entire meal?

Perhaps dementia is a diet, of sorts, for the mind.
                                             Selecting the most delectable,
                        forsaking the usual progression.

For our whole lives, we stuff ourselves

in a predictable manner,
             from soup to crème brûlée.

Perhaps those lost to us are only lost to us,
    but not themselves.
Perhaps their minds, led by a different palate,
             enjoy a picnic of pick-and-choose,
spread out over a meadow
                on a blanket that obscures
                                        memory
                                             to allow them to enjoy
each morsel
               unclogged
by the memory of the last.

“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

 

Noises in the Night

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Noises in the Night

She was six years old and alone in a room that had noises in the wall. She would curl up into a tight little ball under the covers and concentrate on the friendly sounds––the tapping of the pendulum of the clock which hung on the wall beside her bed and the water gurgling through the heating pipes. The muffled voices of her parents down below in the living room. She liked these noises. They made her think that she wasn’t alone.

But she could hear other sounds of the summer night–– the sudden loud popping noise that she thought was a gun until daddy told her that it was only houses settling, or the sound of the elm tree outside her window scraping against the brick on the chimney or the wind as it whined through her screens, making the venetian blinds scrape against their wooden window frames. She could hear things in the walls, too––noises that sounded like people walking and high shrieking noises that daddy said were just mice and not robbers.

The sheet felt muggy on her bare legs and she kicked it off and rolled over. She lay on her stomach and slipped her hand beneath the pillow, sliding it back-and-forth against the trapped coolness of the percale. She glanced at the noisy pendulum clock Santa had brought her for Christmas to help her learn to tell the time. It was her first real clock and it was in the shape of a Shmoo.  She could just make out where its hands were from the light of the streetlamp shining through her window. It wasn’t very late.

She flipped over and slid her legs over the side of the bed, feeling the slight stickiness of the linoleum on her feet as she walked to the window. The air had cooled a bit and it had started to rain. A slight breeze tickled the hairs on her arm and sifted the rain onto her nose as she pressed it close to the screen to smell the mustiness of the wet night grass.

She wondered when her older sisters would get home and come up to bed. It was lonely in a room all alone in the upstairs of a house that had robbers in the walls.

 

For MMM’s Sunday Writing Prompt

Safety in Numbers

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Safety in Numbers

It might beseem the patriarch to forego actions radical,
forsaking them for pastimes more blandly mathematical.
Discourse over Pi and coffee a safer course, by far,
than plotting revolution at a local bar.
That there’s safety in numbers is a much-repeated platitude
much favored over taking risks with a subversive attitude.

Prompt words today are radical, patriarch, beseem and coffee. Image by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash, used with permission.
And for NaPoWriMo, Day 5

Sixteen

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Sixteen

Do you remember when you were unkissed—
dreaming and wondering what you had missed?

Your evenings too tranquil, but you were too scared
to do much about it. You just never dared

to flirt with a guy or call boys on the phone—
too shy to make any advance on your own.

You disparaged those girls who had gone on before you.
You claimed that their exploits did nothing but bore you,

but you knew, really, that they’d won the race
that established you firmly right there in last place.

Not one errant lover had attempted to con you.
No single advance had been foisted upon you.

Alone in this horrid lamentable state,
sweet sixteen and un-kissed was a terrible fate!

Then that night in the summer out under the stars,
when you stood by the roadway between your two cars

and talked for an hour with soft music streaming
from both of your cars, you thought you were dreaming

when finally it happened, and you two were kissing
you finally knew what it was you’d been missing!

 

Word prompts today are tranquil, disparage, kiss, foist and race.

Empty Cities: NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 4 Liminal Poem

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Click on images to enlarge.

Empty Cities

The ghosts of hamburgers lurk in the air,
waiting for children no longer there.
All of their voices turned empty and spare,
waiting lines empty and every chair
devoid of bodies. Each table bare.
To where have they gone? Do you know where?
If people all vanished, would the world care?
Would the lynx and the bobcat, the fox and the hare

and deer from the forests and crocodiles dare
to enter our shopping malls and broach the stair
forever silent, frozen and still?
Would they climb the escalator’s metal hill
and move into spaces filled with our things?
Jackets and towels and soup bowls and rings?
Refrigerators, bicycles and shoes,
donuts and bagels and pretzels and booze?

Tip over displays and ponder just what
we ever accomplished with all of this glut?
When we are gone will the animals wonder
what they can do with all of this plunder?
Will they swim in our pools and loll on our greens?
Will they scratch their wild backs on our mowing machines?
Leap over our cars and stream over our bridges,
enter our houses and nose through our fridges?

Will they make a nest of the socialite’s mink?
Have dozens of babies in our kitchen sink?
Remove stuffing from mattresses to create burrows?
Tunnel under our lawns to make ridges and furrows?
Will monkeys swing from our huge chandeliers?
Chimps drive our cars and strip all the gears?
Cows graze through our parks and horses run free,
no saddles inhibiting their liberty?

Just imagine our world once mankind is vanished.
Once we’ve insured we are finally banished.
Clean air and clean oceans. No traffic or noise.
No cars and no airplanes. No rush hour noise.
No traffic or crowds. No exhaust pipes or trash.
No credit cards, coupons or coinage or cash.
What we saw as improvements will all rust away,
covered with vines, to slowly decay.

Mankind just a segment of time’s stony layers,
our music and art and headlines and prayers
all just one strata within the earth’s stories,
buried like all of her other brief glories.
After we’ve suffered earth’s most recent purge,
and we’re all gone, what else will emerge?

 

For NaPoWriMo 2021 Day Four, Liminal Poem

No Vacancy

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No Vacancy

Hurry your feet and speed up your caboose.
We’ve only minutes left to vamoose.
It’s a nuisance, I know, but our time has run out.
It will do you no good to object or to pout.
The antithesis to one’s arrival is going.
The fact this was coming was well in our knowing.
The details of our living here now are archival.
Just as we saluted upon our arrival,
we now must wave bye-bye and pack up our bags,
fasten their locks and attach our name tags.
You may strive to remain here, but we must be gone.
We’re a nuisance here. We must now move over yon.
That’s the thing with exotic weekend vacations.
There’s always someone with Monday reservations!

Word prompts today are caboose, antithesis, salute, strive and nuisance.