Category Archives: Poem

Internet Appetizers

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Internet Appetizers

Casting our nets wider,
we gather matching minds and hearts
like small silver fish–
just a tiny bite, each one,
trying to fill a big appetite.
No big fish
to struggle to land.
Just nibbles,
one after another,
taking the edge off our hungers.

For dVerse Poets “Connections” prompt.

Bill Blass Blues

Bill Blass Blues

My wife is unfaithful.  She’s out most every night
with another famous man—out in open sight.
She doesn’t want to hide it. She wants her friends to see
that she’s at every swish affair, clad fashionably.
Every Hermes bag and pair of winklepicker shoes
has contributed its bit to my costume blues.

Countless Dior dresses and each Givenchy blouse

added up to why we had to sell the house.
I’d taken out my equity and sold off all my stocks,
I locked her in her room, but she only picked the locks.
When I cancelled all her cards, she just applied for others,
and when I closed out all of those, she asked to use her mother’s.

I am a closet pauper. As you might suppose,
challenged by my wife’s outlandish lust for clothes.
If only her love affairs were with lesser men
than Michael Kors or Givenchy, Dior or Ralph Lauren.
If only she could lighten up and buy her clothes at Ross’s
perhaps I could pay off my loans and modify my losses!

 

 

 

Prompt words today were lighten, challenge, winklepicker and equity.

At Sundown

At Sundown

My day is winding down to its mellow end,
trailing the burnt-off ash of its dissipated energy.
Once-wild winds, trapped by the cooling night,
curl into hollows, exhaling trails of mist through the trees, 
nourishing the night air with tomorrow’s dew.

 

Prompt words today are mellow, nourish, wildly and energy.

Canna Lily: Jan 17, Flower of the Day

For Cee’s FOTD

Beached

Beached

Snug in his nest in Mar-a-Lago he wonders
how to invest the additional plunders
he’s gained in his years of selling his favor.
He ponders his ice cream and wonders what flavor
they delivered today with his fries and Big Mac.
He gives it a lick and then gives a loud quack.
He’s big duck in this puddle, so does not know why
past cronies of his keep passing him by
avoiding eye contact. Do they not recall
how he was the single best POTUS of all?

Where are all of his partners in crime and dissent?
Can anyone tell him where they all went?
Where’s Ivanka?  Where’s Jared? On to their next steal?
Don’t they know he invented the art of the deal?
Once they jumped to his dictates as head of state.
Did other past presidents share the same fate?
Did Jefferson suffer a similar plight?
Did Washington sit alone every night
while Martha took off with her nightclubbing friends?
Did other great men meet with similar ends?

His last month in office he took a great scalding.
He’s lonely, obese and orange and balding.
He’s plummeted earthwards from such a great height
that all  of his minions should share in his plight,
yet they’ve all gone on to lives of their own,
leaving him here to pine on his throne. 
But what is the reason for his blatant smirking?
Can it possibly be that without even working
he’ll draw a huge pension for the rest of his life,
plus a travel allowance for him and his wife?

 

Prompt words for the day are dissent, snug, smirk and blatant. Images thanks to Unsplash. Used with permission.

Still on the Nickel?

Still on the Nickel?

Four hundred thousand for a pension, a million for his travel.
More for his security, McConnell, pound your gavel.

Give him not a penny. Not a nickel nor a dime.

He deserves no further payment for his life of crime.

May the senate use its Trump card to deal out his comeuppance.
When it comes to a pension, he should get nary a tuppence.

We’re tired of his finagling, the lies and all the trouble.
It’s time we drew the needle out to burst his four-year bubble.

If I may be pauciloquent, I’ll simply say, “IMPEACH!!!”
Finally do the right thing. Kick out the sonnofabeach!!!!!!

Prompt words today are comeuppance, trouble, pauciloquent (terse, using few words) and finagle.
“On the Nickel” in this context means “On the dole.” The Nickel is a street in San Francisco where a lot of homeless hang out. That Trump should have his hand out for further entitlements after his term is over just seems unconscionable to me. Let him earn his own nickels from now on. Impeachment will insure this. Here is one of my favorite Tom Waits songs that I drew my title from.

Immodest Proposal

Immodest Proposal

The busy restaurant suddenly as silent as a tomb—
my “No” resounding clearly all across the room.
It was this blunt refusal that brought him to his knees,
begging my forgiveness and finally saying “Please!”
Tenderness exuding from his every word,
he repeated his offer in a manner less absurd.
His sangfroid left behind him, he presented me the ring
with proper reverence as though it was a sacred thing.
It was a better proposal than the first one he had pitched
when he tossed the ring box at me and said, “Wanna get hitched?”

Prompt words today are sangfroid, instead, tenderness and lapse.

First Friends

Click on photos to enlarge.

First Friends

Friendship need not be dazzling at every bend and turn.
It can be a placid river, devoid of roil and churn.
It can merely listen—a sympathetic ear
can be enough to cancel out sorrow, anger, fear.

Friends are one of life’s delights that nothing else replaces—
initials in a school desk that nothing else defaces.
School assignments dreaded, but then attacked together,
countless outings faced as one in mild or stormy weather.

Dazzling feats accomplished: sports, exams and proms. 
Secrets shared together that we’d never tell our moms.
Giggling under covers, far into the night,
regretful tears and tight embrace after a childish fight
.

What can replace a friendship in which every secret’s known?
Even after years apart, when we’re matured and grown?
In every single mother, grandmother or wife,
there are those kernels of  memory of the first friends of her life
.

 

Word prompts for today are assignment, delight, dazzling and friendship.

Final Cure

Final Cure

Her health was being challenged by a constant series of woes.
She had chilblains on her fingers and corns between her toes.
She suffered migraine headaches, and her joints became rheumatic
during the rainy season, when she also turned asthmatic.
Since her approach to cures was stubbornly heuristic,
the remedies she chose to use tended toward pluralistic.
Her health care ran the gamut from Kabbalah to holistic.
One day she saw a doctor and the next she saw a mystic.
And since the switching back and forth became a sort of Hell,
in the end she gave them all up and decided to get well!

 

Prompt words for the day are health, series, heuristic and woe.

Winds of Change

 

Winds of Change

I’m picking at my cuticles and gnawing on my nails.
The winds behind my worries are puffing out their sails.
Operation Trump-bump may require a necromancer
to resurrect some aid to rid us of this monster’s cancer.

Lincoln, Roosevelt and Truman may have words to tell
how to rid our country of the past four years of Hell.
I’m eager to be rid of them and feel some consternation
over just how long it’s taken for this operation.

May less self-serving leaders at this long-awaited date
seize the wheel and take control of our ship of state.
May our country come together, most hoping for the best
and set our past divisions, hopefully, to rest.

 

 

Prompt words today are gnaw, operation, picking and eager.