Category Archives: Poem

Deadly Pick

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Deadly Pick

His coat size has been swelling as his fame keeps shrinking down.
His goal of being lionized has not earned him a crown.
His attempts at speech are aggravating, branding him a fool.
The “facts” he states extraneous, and fiction, as a rule.
He proved to have no budding talent, in fact he’s never bloomed.
From the day they picked him, our country has been doomed.
The seeds he’s spread are poisonous, the ground they fall on blighted,
but hopefully we’ll see the light and his wrongs will be righted.
The seeds of fairness sown again. Our course once more set straight.
And all the horrors he’s planted will wither and abate.

 

Images by Deviant Art and GoodEarth Plants.  Prompt words today are bud, extraneous, aggravate, lionize and coat.

Give Me That Blue (Quadrille for dVerse Poets)

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Not the blue of a heart before forgetting.
The blue of the sky above Colima Volcano,
no other clouds in it except one puff
of earth’s hot breath becoming visible
in the cool morning air.
Like blue caught in icicles.
Give me that blue.

 

A personal note of interest. The water in my house is heated by this volcano!
For dVerse Poets Quadrille Challenge: Sky

School Reunions

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School Reunions

Entangled in the distant past, we recall and illuminate
those fifty-year-old stories as we gather to ruminate.
Pranks, first loves and scandals so far back in our past,
it’s as though it was a movie in which we all were cast.

That thumbtack “someone” placed upon our history teacher’s chair.
Will the scoundrel confess at last? But no, he doesn’t dare.
And in our sixties, will we snitch? No, there is not one.
Not one of us reveals the answer to that smoking gun.

The raided slumber parties, the trips up England’s hill,
we tell the stories of our past until we’ve had our fill,
then jump to doleful stories of tragedies and sorrows—
the few of those lost in their youth, deprived of all their morrows.

Hayrides by the river, pep rallies and school dances,
boys passing girls in cars on Main, pondering their chances.
Wild Homecoming raids on barns where we were building floats,
whisperings in Civics class and furtively passed notes.

Both schools we passed those years in have been felled by wrecking crews,
replaced by newer buildings, erasing all the clues
of years we spent within them, the carvings on the desks,
all our various antics as we lived out youth’s burlesques.

Our memories getting dimmer, each five years, we choose to meet
to reminisce and chew the fat. To drink and dance and eat.
We don’t discuss the present. It’s as though it’s in a haze
as we go back to live our half-remembered yesterdays.

Prompt words today are entangle, doleful, ruminate and jump.

Agastopia

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Agastopia

I simply cannot reconcile that glimmer in your eyes
with any look that I’ve received from any other guys.
My friends say you’re perfidious, yet I don’t get that message.
“Danger” is an ending that your gazes do not presage.
If the frustration that I’m feeling is transmitted in my gaze,
perhaps you will decipher it while wandering its maze.
For every time you’re present, I’m a prisoner of pondering
that question in your eyes that always sets my mind to wandering
down pathways we meander, walking hand-in-hand.
So long as you are in my thoughts, my heart is in remand.
We need a kind interpreter to set our looks aright.
Perhaps there’s a happy ending for him to expedite.

 

Prompt words today are frustration, reconcile, agastopia, perfidious and message.

Agastopia: Admiration of  or a fixation on a particular part of someone’s body.

Emily

6 Replies

Emily

An introspective traveler, my trips are of a kind
wherein I follow footsteps left there by my mind.
They are a kind of loving, these journeys that I take—
the only sort of antics that I ever make.
Outside of them, I squirrel away, hidden in my rooms,
but oh, my friends, within my mind, my next adventure looms!

 

If you are an Emily Dickinson fan, you might enjoy this other poem I wrote, inspired by one of her poems.

Photo of Emily Dickinson from the Emily Dickinson Museum. Prompt words today are footprint, introspective, loving, antics and hide.

Home (A Nonet for dVerse Poets)

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                                                                              Home

Broken shadows across the cracked ground
flow together when skies darken.
As night birds start to call,
we start our long walk
to that place where
light returns 
when we
do.

The opening line of this Nonet is a line from the poem “To the Light of September” by  W.S. Merwin. According to the nonet rules, each line had one less syllable, descending from nine to one.

For the dVerse Poets prompt

Stay of Execution

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Pardon by Way of a Higher Power

There was  a stay of execution, and the prisoner was relieved.
The executioner, in a turmoil, was sorely aggrieved.
If he couldn’t fire incessantly, it put him off his game.
And yet he couldn’t argue with the one who was to blame.
Sometimes it was the law that won, and sometimes the sinner.
He cut his prisoner free and then shuffled off to dinner.
“Does Jimmy want to stay to eat?” his mom was heard to say,
“I can call his mom to ask her, if he wants to stay.”
But the sheriff told his mom that since he wasn’t ichthyophagous,
a tuna sandwich wouldn’t make it past his friend’s esophagus!

Prompt words today are stay, incessant, ichthyophagous, turmoil and game. What travesties of plot these prompts sometimes force upon us!!!

Do-It-Yourself!

10 Replies

Executing

Do-It-Yourself!

He’d written the definitive how-to-do-it guide,
but needed a good editor, so I had applied.

He was a woodsy sort of bloke, self-confident and curious,
but once I got to know him, I found him to be spurious.

Though he seemed independent, when I asked him to replace
a light bulb in its socket, he did a turn-of-face.

He balked and had a certain emergency of bladder
when asked if he would simply climb up on a ladder!

It seems the very sort of jobs he taught us to be doing,
due to his acrophobia, were ones he was eschewing!

When it came to home improvement, he was words upon a shelf,
giving literal meaning to the term “do-it-yourself!”

Prompt words today are woodsy, replace, independent, editor and spurious.

Framed

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Framed

When I’m tired of television, my digestive tract
draws me to the kitchen and there we make a pact.
Shoe by shoe, approach the fridge and though the hour is late,
We stuff ourselves with what’s inside ’til appetites abate.

Making sorties on the fridge with just my own collusion?
The thought I’ll get away with it it’s merely an illusion.
They’re bound to miss that half a pie, but then the plot will thicken
when they  note the absence of half a tub of chicken.

I leave the fridge a bit ajar, the Colonel’s box in front of it,
hoping when it’s time to blame that I won’t take the brunt of it.
I put the pie plate on the floor, increasing the odds that
if I spread bones around it, perhaps they’ll blame the cat!

Prompt words today are illusion, television, late, tract and shoe.

Why Bakeries Were Invented

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Why Bakeries Were Invented

I’ve baked the cake, but cannot get the damn thing from the pan—
the problem being, mainly, that sticky layer of flan.
My daughter had demanded it, persnickety like her dad.
How had she ever heard of flan? I guess it was a fad.

I poured the custard in the pan and covered it with batter,
not sure whether the flan went first or if it was the latter.
Ten minutes in the oven and the glop began to rage
as though it was an animal, intent to leave its cage.

It roiled and fluxed, formed bubbles and spouted like fresh lava.
I lit a cigarette and poured another cup of java.
Although it was her birthday, I rued the day I’d asked
what kind of cake she wanted, for in this I’m sorely tasked.

But surprisingly, this devil cake did not escape its boundaries,
in spite of all my puzzlements and all my gross confounderies.
Now that I’ve finally got it out, I really am exhausted—
only to hear her next request. Now she wants it frosted!!!

Prompt words for today are exhausted, cage, flux, persnickety and cover.