Category Archives: Poem

White Knight

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photo by Moss on Unsplash. Used with permission

White Knight

His choice of her as wife must clear enough betoken
that he has a predilection for the damaged and the broken.
When they met, ’twas clear she was a maiden in distress.
She’d tipped a cocktail over and ruined her favorite dress.
He furnished first a hanky, and when it proved ineffective,
he replaced the sodden garment with a new one less defective.

She seemed to have no talent save for partying and shopping.
Her credit cards were all maxed out, but still she wasn’t stopping.
Prada, Hermes, Target, Ross—she loved to shop them all.
After Amazon, her favorite was, of course, the mall.
She never checked the price tags. Didn’t money grow on trees?
But she had a fatal beauty that brought him to his knees.

Enchanted by her problems, he sought to solve them all.
He’d demonstrate his prowess. He’d get right on the ball.
He fixed her dripping kitchen sink and jacked up her foundation,
solved her termite problem and her rodent infestation.
And once her house was perfect, his role clear as her savior,
he settled in to trying to solve her bad behavior.

Language lessons, charm school, manicures and waxing.
It’s clear she found these self-improvement strategies most taxing.
She flunked out of the classes and grew back all the hair.
And yet he felt no let-down. He was feeling debonaire
as he came up before her and sank down on one knee,
produced a six-carat diamond and a “Will you marry me?”

The advent of their wedding found his family full of wrath.
They prayed she’d trip upon the stairs or drown within her bath.
But fate did not oblige them, and soon there was a wedding—
the showers and the ceremony, honeymoon and bedding.
He had bought a bride as though purchasing a house.
A little money down and the rest when she was spouse.

She brought her problems with her and once he’d paid her debts—
her bills and parking tickets—then there were the pets.
A cockatoo, a cobra, a Saint Bernard, a kitten.
They filled his living room, his den, and yet he was still smitten.
After a month, his house in tatters, patience growing thin,
her extended family started moving in.

Her father was a gambler, her mother fond of gin.
Her little brother played the drums, which set up quite the din.
Yet not a friend felt sorry for these things that disconcerted him.
His servants soon gave notice and his family deserted him.
They’d all given their warnings—advice he hadn’t heeded,
yet he marveled over where friends went when they were really needed!

The moral never occurs at the start, where it is needed,
probably because it knows that it won’t be heeded.
Experience works better than any threat or warning
to curb initial excitement in favor of deep mourning.
The end is most predictable. The marriage didn’t last,
and with no prenuptial, the lot was surely cast.

They split his fortune down the middle. She made off with half,
but she had to take her family, so he had the last laugh.
The animals went to a zoo. The drums went with her brother.
He packed up all her cousins and her father and her mother
and left them on the doorstep of the mansion that she’d bought.
And so ends our story with its moral clearly taught.

All dragons were slain long ago and white knights are passé,
so solving maidens’ problems is clearly déclassé.
If you wish to save the world, try starting a foundation.
Send needy kids to summer camp or fund their education.
Chivalry, I fear is dead, so don’t try to revive it.
For as I’ve demonstrated, there’s a chance you won’t survive it!

 

Prompt words for today are enchanted, damage, advent, predilection and bath.

Dog Language

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IMG_5492

Dog Language

It’s true I can decipher after all these years
every little wiggle, each twitching of their ears.
See that head’s uplifting? The garbageman is near.
That ruff of neck spells danger. Tail between legs means fear.

One whine warns of a squirrel invading territory
intended for two dogs alone. Then barks are mandatory!
Sirens were meant for harmony—their plaintive howls a must.
Head bowed down submissively signals respect and trust.

They also know my language. When I move to the door
three rooms away to feed the cats, I hear their hungry roar.
Up against the back door, starving paws commence to scrape.
If I had plans to skip their meal, now there is no escape.

It is their task to let me know when feeding time is close,
and when I move at snail’s pace, they become quite verbose.
The younger dog, much better trained, awaits me in his cage,
surprised at how the older dog dares to jump and rage.

Ordered outside, he edges closer, full of twists and flounces.
The minute that the bowls are lowered, he charges in and pounces.
Then each is most fastidious in licking clean his plate,
fearing that starvation is a likely fate.

They keep a vigilant watch on me, peering through the bars
between the terrace and kitchen, as I open jars.
They hear the fridge door opening, they see each morsel fall.
If they ever get inside, they will devour them all.

And when perchance they sneak inside, against their master’s wishes,
take on the chore of licking clean all the old cat’s dishes.
How else might they show gratitude, with no words to express it?
They simply have to wag their tails and hope that I might guess it!

Prompt words today are fastidious, task, uplifting, decipher and snail.

Lovesick

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photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash. Used with permission.

Lovesick

Your proposal that we call in sick and the steady beat
drummed against the windowpane by the driving sleet
divulge a secret pleasure long-buried in my actions
of playing hooky and long days devoid of verbs and fractions.
Zealous plans to fool Mom with coughs and groans and wheezes.
Crumpled Kleenex, put-on gags and manufactured sneezes.

In spite of what the calendar reveals to be a Monday,
stretching out the weekend into another fun day,
I call your boss, you call mine. By noon the clouds have lifted.
All the sleet has vanished from the corners where it drifted.
We put on boots to splash through puddles, bringing back our youth,
as silly as mere teenagers a bit long in the tooth.

We gorge on pizza, eaten in front of the TV.
I win at double solitaire. You win at Tripoly.
We pop some corn and eat it with peanut M&Ms
until the clouds roll in again and when the sunlight dims,
we return to bed again to get a little nookie—
that added pleasure when it is adults who play at hooky. 

 

Prompt words today are calendar, divulge, proposal, zealous and sleet.

The Other Shoe

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The Other Shoe

Because it’s winter.  Because you’re you—
an annoying pebble in my shoe.
My darkest dream, my shuddered sigh.
A tear unfallen from my eye.

You call my action radical.
I call your action terminal.
No more the tiny cringing wren,
no more the clucking, docile hen.

This time, your insult vilely hurled,
my reflex impulses unfurled,
my anger at the optimum,
I call you ingrate lazy bum.

I kick you out into the cold
in an action brave and bold.
I lock the door and pull the blind.
Not cruel, but suddenly I’m kind

to myself, so long obscured
by all injustice I’ve endured.
On my bed, once shared with you,
I sit and drop the other shoe.

Better alone with what will come
than with a selfish doltish bum.
I square my shoulders, fall to sleep.
No Lord my soul will have to keep.

Don’t know where this came from. It’s fiction fueled by past feelings of escape from a bad love affair, I guess. Blame the prompt words.Prompts today were winter, because, radical, optimum and wren.

Remembering Grandma at the Thirtieth School Reunion

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Remembering Grandma at the Thirtieth School Reunion

When children guessed her age, I guess they might have guessed a million,
for her skin was fried and wrinkled and her manner most reptilian.
Her humor was peculiar—ribald, clever, sly.
Her whiskered chin was wobbly. She was rheumy in one eye.
When she talked about the old days and when people really listened,
her face seemed somehow younger and her eyes sparkled and glistened,

but she sputtered over S’s and dribbled when she talked.
She listed, lurched and wobbled. She zigzagged when she walked.
She loved her old blue tennis shoes with laces hanging down—
the only shoes she wore when she chose to go to town.
Still, her corns rubbed and her toes hurt. She preferred feet that were bare,
so she very rarely moved about once planted in her chair.

When her children brought her meals to her, they couldn’t linger long.
She couldn’t quite remember what it was that she’d done wrong.
Her grandkids liked her better and endured her bitter wit.
She taught them Chinese Checkers and some of them to knit,
but as they aged they visited less and less and less.
They didn’t like the odors. They didn’t like the mess.

And finally, as youngest, only I was able
to bear sitting with Grandma at her Chinese checkers table.
Only I could stand all the complaints and labored sighs—
all of the self-pity that shone out of her eyes.
But later, as a teen-ager, my visits, too, grew less.
Busy with my friends and school and other things, I guess.

And for all the years after she died, I thought about the years
when even I deserted her and I was brought to tears,
until my thirtieth class reunion, when a classmate I’d not seen
since we graduated, and for all the years between,
told a tale I’d never heard that made me realize
that there was more to life than what met my ears and eyes.

When television, new to town, kept Grandma company,
wild cats from her old henhouse came to sit upon her knee,
and the kids from the next corner also came to see,
for with ten kids in the family, they didn’t have TV.
It grew into a ritual. When they saw the sheen
emanating from the light of her TV screen,

they’d all drop in to see her and they’d stay until their pop
walked down from their house to bring their viewing to a stop.
Only the oldest daughter got to stay there until ten,
watching shows with Grandma—pretty ladies, handsome men,
cowboy shows and orchestras, adventure and romance.
They watched their favorite characters shoot and kiss and dance.

“We kids all called her Grandma,” my old classmate  confessed.
That she’d had this second family, our family hadn’t guessed.
So all those nights I thought that she’d been sitting all alone,
she’d been surrounded by her minions, like a queen upon her throne.
It seems the true facts of our past by memory can’t be gauged,
for sometimes history is rewritten and our consciences assuaged.

Prompt words today are reptilian, plant, ribald, peculiar and fried.

Femme Fatale

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Image by Thiago Barletta on Unsplash used with permission

Femme Fatale

I must say the dress  she wore—that sexy little number
did much to rouse the bench sitters from their usual slumber.

They rooted and they murmured. Some stood to lift their caps
at the revealing nature of her dress—especially its gaps.

She did as much to ameliorate the boredom of their day
as all the other passersby who passed along the way,

causing some widening of some eyes, some laboring for breath,
but it is only rumor that she caused one codger’s death.

Some say they’d seen him earlier clutching at his chest,
so a contributing factor was what she was at best.

Prompt words today are rouse, root, labor, ameliorate and number.

Sub-tropical Skies: Open Book

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Open Book

Here beneath the Tropic of Cancer,
the sky is a book opened to the wrong pages.
The Big and Little Dippers?
Pages ripped from the spine.
Orion a well-thumbed page,
held directly overhead like a book
read lying on my back.

And is it fact or fantasy
that once I saw the Southern Cross
stretched on its back
near the horizon 
to the south?

Floating half-asleep with mists
of water hot from the volcano
rising around me,
was it a dream or real,
those four twinkling stars
seen just once before that night our boat
slipped over the equator?

Then, as now,
all time seems wedded—
afloat in a universe
of stars and water—
tiny no-see-ums
forming their own active constellations
as they whirl up over the water
and back down in clusters.
Wee moving
stars.

Ashes

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Ashes

A handful of memories, discounted by time.
Five for a nickel and ten for a dime.
Burned down to ashes, their bodies erased
along with the dreams they achieved or they chased.

How we incorporate thoughts of the past
into our lives may alter and cast
the present in molds that are better off shattered.
Better new memories than those aged and tattered.

Life is for living, so best throw away
corpses of the past that get in the way.
Living is glorious, but it’s not portable.
By merely living, we become deportable.

Thoughts hoarded in dreams should dissolve in the day.
Think too much of the past and it gets in the way.
As hard as it is, it seems that we must
render ashes to ashes, return dust to dust.

 

Prompt words for today are ash, portable, glorious, incorporate and erase.

If You Can’t be Real, be Surreal (I Just Get My Religion from People)

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I Just Get My Religion from People

She hooks one long red fingernail
and her left ear disappears.
She points the nail tip to her thumb
and the table rises into the air.
She wrinkles her nose and the table
comes down but the lights go out.
When they come on,
she’s gone but her shoes are still
under the table,
one toe pointed backward––
one heel broken.

Music shows in the air,
hung there by its black tails.
I open a window, blow
jazz to the corners of the room.
I open the door and her shoes walk
out on the wrong side of each other.
“How’s she doing today?” asks the doorman
on my way out.
“We’re getting her act together,” I say.
Catch up to her shoes at the
taxi stand at the corner,
hail them a cab.

For the dVerse Poets Surreal Poetry prompt.

 

 

 

verseVV

Bail to the Chief

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Photo by Deleece Cook on Unsplash

Bail to the Chief

The prediction is most likely. His surfing days are through.
Lies never imperceptible are sticking now like glue.
His lobbyists don’t have enough cash to hide the fact
that the power they once lauded is folding up its act.

His juggling days are near an end. The balls litter the ground
of the White House where he juggled them. They’re lying all around.
His circus act soon over, those who lauded him must see
that all of his maneuverings were based on trickery.

The wave that brought him into power was fueled by deception
traitorous in its acting out and vile in its conception.
Here’s a chief we want to oust and cannot bear to hail.
The oval office does not suit him. He’d be better off in jail.

Photo by Avalonia on Unsplash.

Prompt words today are imperceptible, lobby, prediction, laud, and surfing.