Sun’s up, Cheer Up!
Although the moon is obstinate, They’re waking up the sun.
It’s time to fold your dreams away, to shake out the day’s fun.
When adventure’s inconspicuous, still you can try to find it.
Time is always ticking but you can’t forget to wind it.
Knit your future to your dreams and life will be your plum.
When life can be so wonderful, why spend it being glum?
Prompt words for today are wake, inconspicuous, knit, obstinate and up.
Afternoon Under Cats.
I’m feeling lethargic, no gumption or drive.
If you saw me now, you would doubt I’m alive.
I’m flat on my back in a bit of a bind,
looking for energy that I can’t find.
So though I need coffee to wash down some Bayer’s,
my cats are on top of me, piled in layers.
Obstinate creatures, they simply won’t move.
They laze around daily with nothing to prove.
And what must be giggles just come out as purrs.
I need me some whips and I need me some spurs
so I can herd cats from their comfy position
that they have adopted as part of their mission
to make sure that I do not deign to stir,
remaining inert under bundles of fur.
Prompts for today are gumption, layer, giggle, obstinate and find.
What Can One Man Do?
I’m feeling sort of creepy. I’m feeling sort of weird.
Everything is happening as I’ve always feared.
Each heroic patriot is spinning in his grave
observing how politicos are choosing to behave.
Opportunists rule the day. Liberty is dying.
If our founding fathers saw ,it would be grounds for crying.
Rights of free assembly are brutally curtailed
by countless senseless massacres, no sooner one man jailed
than another slaughter comes across our screen.
When did our land of immigrants turn so crass and mean?
What god puts kids in cages, rips a mother from her baby?
What scripture teaches brotherhood tempered with a maybe?
One hundred thirty million of her native sons
slaughtered by our founders is how the west was won.
Our history books rewritten by a kinder pen
Mass lynchings in Arkansas? A secret way back when
history was written. Only now we know the shame.
Even at our founding, “more profit” was to blame.
If we are tired of hearing of greed and violence,
perhaps its time that more of us climbed down from the fence
and let communal voices be heard above the din
of Game of Thrones and other dream worlds we live in.
These films of gore and violence with which we are suffused
make us numb to how real people are abused.
We must take off our blinders and see the truth at last.
It’s time to break these heartless molds in which we have been cast.
Speak with your pen. Bring change about by changing those in power.
Do not turn to fantasy. Do not cringe and cower
in your homes for fear of guns. Ban assault guns for a start.
Show that real Americans have a kinder heart.
Cut our country’s cancer from where it’s gone to fester.
Remove our gallery of fools, starting with its jester.
Each one who sits upon his chair thinking his votes don’t count
votes to keep the status quo. One after one, they mount
a ship of fools who think that politicians are the same—
that refusing to make choices makes them without blame.
So thought the men who saw the tree with bodies hanging slack
and overlooked injustice because the men were black.
If your God is one of mercy, does he not view all?
Does he not see even the smallest sparrow fall?
Would he sanction kids in cages, mother ripped from baby?
Does the God who loves us all temper justice with “maybe?”
What can we do about it? Take up pen and make a check.
Vote out the opportunists. Seize injustice by the neck.
Protect our dying planet. Seize our final chance.
Don’t think that fate is ruled by impartial circumstance.
Looking for a solution for what one man can do?
Take pen in hand. The answer, my friend, is simply you!
Prompts for the day are weird, creepy, and memorialize.
An Aging Siren’s Lament
I once was bewitching, beguiling and busty,
but now I’m decrepit, doddering and fusty,
making mountains of molehills and blocks out of chips
and adding them onto my thighs, calves and hips.
As I fall apart, I become more voluminous,
my eyes less dewy, my skin much less luminous.
I’m developing poorly, my aging less fine
than mellow old cheeses and whiskies and wine.
As my memory fades and becomes much less credible,
I’m less appealing and for sure less beddable.
I’m held together by trusses and braces,
Spanx and Ace bandages, spandex and laces.
Someone should just shoot me. (Botox, not a gun.)
I’d be more alluring and have much more fun.
But diets are tedious. Shots must be painful.
Of all of these cures, I’m purely disdainful.
I guess I’ll age gracefully, sip from its cup
greedily, admitting I’m giving up.
I’ll simply sit here inert on my fanny
and trade in the title of sexpot for granny!
Prompts today are fusty, bewitching, chip and mountain.
Nostalgia Reexamined
The sublimity remembered when memory has its turn
often has beginnings in nostalgia’s timely churn.
That teenage bliss that we recall as being overjoyed
if remembered correctly would be being over-boyed.
Our adoration of the past is easier than giving
all the same attention to the life that we are living.
Prompt words today are nostalgia, overjoyed, adoration and sublimity.
Aroma Therapy
There’s a distinctive odor coming from your shoe.
I don’t know what is causing it. I’m sure it isn’t you.
An acquisitive vampire might pay big bucks for it
to augment the fetid odor in his burial pit.
When it comes to hygiene, I have very little tact,
so I have used hyperbole to illustrate the fact
that from the big toe of each foot right over to its pinky,
the fact is not debatable. Your feet are very stinky!
Prompt words today are odor, vampire, illustrate and acquisitive.
Premature Delivery
I can’t defend or explicate the reason for my ardor
for that triple-decker cake residing in my larder.
Tomorrow was its due date, the delivery premature.
Now I have a compulsion for which there’s just one cure.
My love is unrequited. That torte has neither lips
nor anything but calories to slip around my hips.
At this extravaganza they’ve planned to celebrate
my forty-second birthday on my birthing date,
there must be a cake to eat. I must be resolute
to not pre-sample one small bite. I am of fine repute
and do not want it known that I’m unable to resist
cake with chocolate icing, and so I must insist
that you call a locksmith to secure the door
with deadlock and with padlock and perhaps with one lock more.
If my cake survives past midnight and a few hours tomorrow,
I will defray embarrassment and a good deal of sorrow.
For minute after minute and hour after hour,
I fear resisting chocolate cake is far beyond my power.
I was born to greatness—to talent and to fame,
but when chocolate comes up missing, it’s likely I’m to blame.
Prompt words for today are extravaganza, resolute, unrequited and explicate.
Transmogrification
All our rites of passage wherein we choose a route
different from our life before–a new way that will suit
the person that we will become in the bye and bye—
a way that’s calculated to stump and mystify
those who cannot understand how we might want to switch—
why we have that need to change—to scratch that travel itch.
We scout out new horizons, travel uncharted roads.
Change our occupations, alter our abodes.
Thus does our universe expand and thus, so, do our lives.
In variety perpetual, evolution thrives.
Prompt words for the day are passage, switch, scout and mystify.
Lady in Waiting
He was the best creation of the queen and king.
and when she held him in her arms, he cancelled out the sting
of all the ladies in waiting who, noting well her shyness,
spent more time in waiting for his royal highness.
Neither naive or clueless, she tended to her tallying.
As he maneuvered his affairs, she noted the king’s dallying.
And as the young prince gained in years, growing more coherent,
she was his fond protector, his loving, loyal adherent.
One-by-one she noted the ladies, one and all
slip away—no longer there at her beck and call.
And as each lady in waiting went into her gestation,
another lovely maiden appeared to fill her station.
And so young princes flourished, on both sides of the blanket.
The velvet cord for service, when she had cause to yank it,
brought new faces yearly, or monthly at the worst.
Daily, as she faced the mirror, she patiently rehearsed
fond loving glances that she’d use as she addressed her ruler,
all the time retaining thoughts that were surely crueler.
Living every day the charade only for her son,
determined from his day of birth that he would be the one
chosen for succession—the legal royal heir.
She watched him with devotion, with tender lover care.
She’d create a king more loyal. More loving and more tender.
One less bent on conquering the more gentle gender.
By using his royal talents in pastimes much less crass,
perhaps a much more glorious age would come to pass.
More time spent in reigning and less time spent in bed.
More prosperity for all with him in charge instead,
and, in fact, her dreams came true once the king was dead,
her son declared the monarch and securely wed,
with prosperity for all and every subject fed,
this is the happy ending with no more to be read.
Prompt words today are prince, coherent, sting and creation.
Black Cloud
She felt she was a target for adversity
and rued the problems of her life in their immensity.
Each day was a new puzzle produced for her to solve,
as though she had to face it in order to evolve.
Her very productivity was challenged day by day—
always a new dragon to face and then to slay.
Year after year she dealt with trouble after trouble,
each day another needle meant to burst her bubble,
until her forced retirement brought relief at last.
No more new dilemmas coming at her fast.
When life that had been speeding by shifted down in gears,
still that feeling of relief she’d waited for for years
always seemed around the bend. Her spirits never soared,
for when her life turned trouble-free, she ended up just bored.
Prompt words today are puzzle, productive, target and adversity.
