Category Archives: Poem

Man Child

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Man Child

He’s a bomb at being serious. He’s jolly, rash and wild.
In essence, he’s never grown up. He’s a perpetual child.
His rustic simplicity is anything but charming,
for he’s redolent of fishing smells and horse riding and farming.

His impetuosity has often brought on trouble,
leading to some barroom brawls and the resulting rubble.
For all these things, he’s won a sort of infamous renown,
and he’s banned from almost all the pubs in his little town.

The local folks have made excuses for him all his life,
but such crass indulgences won’t garner him a wife.
He’d like to have some kids himself–a most unlikely bid
so long as he himself insists on acting like a kid.

Word prompts for today are bomb, jolly,  rustic simplicity, impetuous.

Festive Is

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Festive Is

. . . ribbons and candles and holly.
Christmas trees, parties both raucous and jolly.
Confetti in hair and the nerve to kiss boys
beneath the mistletoe, and other joys.

Presents and eggnog and wedding cake, too.
Fireworks. Flags waving red, white and blue.
Easter egg optimism in the hunting,
papel picado and streamers and bunting.

Festive is hearts charged up with the living.
Anticipation and loving and giving.
Remembrance of exploits and births and unitings,
Easter ham slicings and turkey leg bitings.

May baskets on doorsteps. Socks hung in a row.
Eggnog and streamers wherever you go.
Who knows where festivity had its first starts—
Easter egg rolling or Valentine hearts?

Square dances, cloggings and Virginia reelings
end up on the feet but start with warm feelings
that set toes to tapping and make folks so restive
that they have no choice but to end up as festive!

Before presents and food and new decorations
increase credit card debt to new elevations,
perhaps we’ll remember to go back to the start
and return the horse to in front of the cart.

Our kids need to learn that joy can’t be bought,
and it’s up to us that the lesson be taught.
Before it’s too late, we must somehow impart
that there’s no charge for love and no price tag on heart.

Word prompts today are festive, nerve, optimism and charge.

Alfresco Dining Plans

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Alfresco Dining Plans

Kitties make the most of serendipity
as they wait for squirrels in the shadow of a tree.
If they’re very silent, the squirrels do not see
and they ooze down to the grass oh so fluidly.

Squirrels have a preference for nuts that may be found
matured on the tree but fallen to the ground—
nourishment the tree has propined for their use,
not accounting for the kittens’ cruel abuse.

So nature feeds on nature every single day,
but it’s a happy ending. The squirrel got away.
The kittens, on the other hand, had no cause to pout.
They merely had to make do with the kibble I dished out!


 

Prompt words for today are kitties, preference, serendipity and propine.

Patent Pending

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Image by Jake Pierrelee on Unsplash.

A Modest Proposal

I am applying, here on bent knee,
for you to grant a franchise to me
to be your beloved—your regular guy.
Given that I am awkward and shy,
but I am also one jubilant fellow,
determined in will though my legs are like Jell-o,
who aims to get over his natural bent,
in order to voice, to proclaim and to vent
that my heart will be steadfast and loving and true
If you will grant me a patent on you!

Word prompts today are shy, franchise, jubilant and beloved.

Dog Smarts

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Dog Smarts

My dog is a rapscallion, ingenious and quick.
I rarely have an ice cream where he doesn’t steal a lick.
Every time I think that It’s not happening this time,
he gets the better of me with his little mime.

First he feigns indifference so I’m caught off my guard,
and then in a mere second, he’s running through the yard,
my cone extending from his jaws as though he is a bird.
So rapid that to try to run and catch him is absurd.

But in my desperation, I do so anyway.
I aimed to teach a lesson that crime doesn’t pay,
so I bought another cone–my second one today,
and took him on a walk with me, licking all the way.

I wouldn’t look the other way. I wouldn’t get distracted.
The seizure of my ice cream cone would not be reenacted!
It was my dog who got distracted  by a small dog with a bone.
By the time that I caught up with him, the other dog lay prone

with my dog above him, thinking that he alone
should have it, so you guessed it, I offered him my cone!
And so my efforts foiled again, I resorted to barter,
demonstrating once again, my canine friend is smarter.

Prompt words today are rapscallion, ingenious, desperation and rapid.

As Her Majesty Ordains

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As Her Majesty Ordains

An extraordinary show pooch, she was top dog in her class.
Her coat was long and silky and glittered like fine glass.
Her canine teeth were pearly, her tail a lovely plume.
Every eye turned toward her when she walked into a room.

Her master, pumped-up in his pride, gloried in her fame.
Every judge in every show knew her fabled name.
At shows he closely guarded her from every dog she met.
Never took her walking, lest her feet get wet.

Not once had she chased a ball, a rabbit or a stick.
She couldn’t jump in leaves for her coat was just too thick.
Her master feared she’d sully it and he would be the one
who’d pay with time spent grooming her if she had some fun.

But the neighbor was her savior when her master was away,
for he would come into her yard and they would run and play.
Fetching sticks and playing tug-rope and racing through the yard,
she could simply be a doggie and let down her royal guard.

But one day her master came home in the middle of the morning
and caught them in their playtime with nary a pre-warning.
He promptly whistled for his dog to bring it to an end,
casting a baleful look at his pet’s clandestine friend.

But her highness did not deign to come, in spite of all her training.
No matter what her master did, she ended up remaining
close to her only playmate–hoping the yells would end,
but instead her master fumed and shouted at her only friend.

“You hogamadog? I going to steal your cat one day!”
(Did I reveal he was Italian? You know they talk that way.)
And did I say the neighbor had a cat? He did, you know, of course.
(Sometimes when I talk, the cart goes on before the horse.)

But the whole thing ended happily. The neighbor pled his case
and before the day was over, the dog’s master joined the chase.
The neighbor helped with grooming after they all jumped in leaves,
thereby doing in one of the master’s former peeves.

Did I introduce the owner? His first name was Giuseppe.
Oscar was the neighbor, both duplicitous and peppy.
Duchess was the given name of the illustrious bitch
who improved her retrieval once her master learned to pitch.

 

Prompt words for the day are pearl, fumes, hogamadog and glitter.

Then and Now

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Then and Now

That spontaneous body that moved with swish and sway
never quite believed that there would come a day
when spring would turn to sprang and run turn into ran
and movement would become a thing achieved by plot and plan.

Dancing done in memory raises less of a sweat.
When we swim in remembrance, rarely do we get wet.
Every action has two pleasures. The first is when we do it,
but it’s equally fantastic later on when we review it.

 

Prompt words today are swish, body, spontaneous and fantastic.

Locationally Challenged

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Locationally Challenged

I’ve misplaced my glasses. Yesterday it was my keys.
If they weren’t attached, I’m fairly sure I’d lose my knees.
Some say I’m absent-minded, others say I am forgetful,
but whatever you may call me, you can bet I’m often fretful.

Whenever I walk through my house, I am forever gleaning
things I’ve lost throughout the week since Yolanda’s last cleaning.
But though I look for hours, my passport just stays lost.
I obsess about it all week long. My dreams are tempest-tossed.

Monday morning, when she arrives, it takes her just a minute
to approach me with her hand held out with my passport in it!
Ironic that though I’m the only one here who can use it,
that I also seem to be the only one who can’t peruse it!

First I lost my laptop and then I lost its mouse.
I looked under the sofa. I combed the whole darn house.
I sought it in the hammock, in the front seat of my car.
It wasn’t on the bathtub ledge, the table or the bar.

Finally, I found it in the last place where you’d look—
on the shelf above the kibble in the doggie nook!
Too many things to think about. Too many things to do.
I simply have to find a way where I can shed a few.

I’ll sacrifice my waistline and a smooth complexion. 
I’ll put up with my creaky bones and energy’s defection.
Just to keep my memory is all that I am asking,
like back when I was young and I excelled at multi-tasking.

 Prompt words for today are misplaced, bet, legendary and glean.

The Kiss-Off

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The Kiss-Off

This incessant waiting clearly is the pits.
Frankly, I am tempted to say I call it quits.
I’ve been standing here for minutes when I’d much rather be seated,
and in spite of the tree’s canopy, I’m feeling rather heated.

The onus is on you, my friend, to tell me why we’re meeting.
You’ve used up your excuses and used up your entreating.
Friends do not do the things you do. They keep your confidences.
They do not carry tales. They come to their friends’ defenses.

You beg to meet just once again and then you show up late?
I rue the day I bonded with such a reprobate.
You have not won me over, in fact, without a doubt,
I fear our friendship’s over. Your test period’s run out! 

 

words for today are canopy, onus, incessant and waiting.

After the Town Reunion, For Jim

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After the Town Reunion
For Jim

Sandwiched in age
between
my two older sisters
and ten years my senior,
he is someone from so long ago
that he seems more myth than actuality.
Yet when he asks me to write a poem
about hummingbirds,
even now, more than a year after the reunion
and sixty years since I had seen him before that,
honored to be noticed,
as little kids are with older kids,
I comply with his wishes.

My first hummingbird days, Jim,
centered around the trumpet vine
that clung to the trellis
on the south side of our big front porch.
It was the side you wouldn’t have seen
as you walked from your house to the grade school
across the street from us,
but it was where
both hummers
and I
loved to hang out.
I lay on the porch on my stomach
on a folded-over blanket,
chin on my fists,
legs crossed at the ankles,
to watch their thrusting flights,
or stood on the concrete sidewalk—
roughened to prevent falls on the ice in winter,
but its numerous small ravines
filled nonetheless with my flesh—
the remainders of knees oft-skinned
while attempting to round its curve
on roller skates,
or simply from falls during rushed passages
in the heat of a game of hide-and-seek
or cops and robbers.

Whether I lay or stood
made no difference
to the hummingbirds
who executed their
sweep and dart, then paused suspended,
wings creating great outspread parasails
that held their small bodies
motionless in mid-air as they sipped
nectar from the speckled throats
of orange honeysuckle blooms,
profuse and heavy on their tangled vines.

Shifting to the nearby grass,
I closed my eyes to the music of their wings,
opened my eyes to see their blur—
another smudged memory
that moved too quickly
out of hearing
and of sight.

 

And, lest you, like Jim, think I have been neglecting hummingbirds in my poetry, HERE and HERE and HERE are three links to poems that at least mention hummers.