Category Archives: Poem

Books, for dVerse Poets Open Link Night

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Books

The fresh bookstore smell of them,
bending the pages to crack the spine,
notes scribbled in the margins,
underlines,
hearts with initials on the flyleaf,
something to loan or to wrap for a gift,
something propped up on the bathtub edge,
it’s paper sprinkled with drops–
pages wrinkled into a Braille memory–
that rainstorm run through.
How he put it in his back pocket.

Poetry touched by fingers.
Single words met by lips.
Words pored over by candlelight or flashlight
in a sleeping bag or in a hut with no electricity.
Books pushed into backpacks
and under table legs for leveling.

Paper that soaked up
the oil from fingers
of the reader
consuming popcorn
or chocolate chip cookies
in lieu of the romance on the pages–
finger food served with brain food.

Passions wrapped in paper and ink–
the allure of a book and its tactile comfort.
The soul of a book you could touch, fold, bend.

Books are the gravestones of trees
but also the journals of our hearts.
Cities of words,
boards and bricks of letters,
insulated by hard covers or the curling skins
of paperbacks.
Something solid to transfer the dreams
of one person to another in a concrete telepathy
of fingers and eyes.
Books are the roads we build between us,
solid and substantial–
their paper the roadbed,
the words the center lines directing us

What will fill the bookcases of a modern world?
Google replacing dictionaries,
Wikipedia already an invisible bank of Encyclopaedia Britannicas.
What will we use our boards and bricks for,
if not to hold up whole tenements of books?
How will we furnish our walls?
What will boys carry to school for girls?
What will we balance on heads
to practice walking with perfect posture?
What will we throw in the direction of the horrible pun?

Will there be graveyards for books, or cities built of them?
Quaint materials for easy chairs or headboards for beds?
Will we hollow them out for cigar boxes
or grind them up for packing material?
Where do books belong in the era of Kindle and Audible?
These dinosaurs that soon will not produce more eggs––
 perhaps they’ll grow as precious as antiques.
The grandchildren of our grandchildren
will ponder how to open them. Will wonder at their quaintness,
collecting them like mustache cups or carnival glass,
wondering about the use of them–as unfathomable as hieroglyphics.
That last book closing its pages––one more obsolete mystery
fueling the curiosity of a bygone era that has vanished
into a wireless universe.

For the dVerse Poets Open Link Night

And….Here is a link to another poem published today: “BEGINNING”

To see how others responded to the prompt go HERE.

Skinny-Dipping for One Word Challenge

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Skinny-Dipping

daily life color103

Important note: This is a shape poem , (at least the last two stanzas are) but if you look at it in Reader, it distorts the shape by left margin justifying.  Please click on the title again and you will view it from my blog where it will be centered and you can see the shape.

Skinny-Dipping 

There’s a change in the weather, a shift in the light.
The palm trees are swaying. Three stars shining bright.
The water is cooling, my exercise through.
Clouds cover the moon. I think it’s my cue
to get out of the water before I turn blue,
then clouds shift and the moon turns its usual hue.

The wind stirs the water. I think of past times
ages ago in different climes.
All those past lives, can they really be mine?
If I put experience in a straight line,
could I see the reason for things as they were
as my life sped by–—a perpetual whirr?

What gave me the courage to do what I did
since that time long ago when I was a kid
and took that first journey out on my own,
out of the house across grass newly mown,
fresh from the bathtub, laughing with glee,
nude for the whole world to look out and see.

Running down the sidewalk until I was captured
again by my mother, winded but enraptured
by this two-year-old daughter escaped from her bath,
already set out on her singular path.
So many roadways traveled since then.
So many different lives that have been

tried and discarded in favor of others.
Surrogate fathers and surrogate mothers,
surrogate sisters and friends freshly minted,
plane tickets ordered, paid for and printed.
Travel adventures. Dangers to survive.
Making it through it all still alive.

I come up     from the pool,
dripping and     shivering.
Those few    bold stars
above me    delivering
promises     that I
might still   be a rover.
While there   is breath left,
my life       isn’t over.

For Word of the Day the prompt is “Bathtub.”

An October Horror Story, for dVerse Poets

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An October Horror Story: Hollow E’en

They pound upon my door and wait outside my wall.
One climbs a tree to peer within. I hope he doesn’t fall.
I cower here within my house and pray they’ll go away.
Though I am not religious, eventually I pray.

Their little voices raise a pitch. They start to bay and howl.
There’s a flutter in my heart region, a clutching in my bowel.
I purchased Reese’s Pieces and miniature Kit Kats
just for all these masked and costumed little brats.

My motives were unselfish. The candy was for them,
for I don’t eat much candy in efforts to grow slim.
And yet that bag of Reese’s, those small Kit Kats and such
called to me from where they were sequestered in my hutch.

It started with a whisper, hissing out their wish:
“We would look so pretty laid out on a dish!”
I knew that they were evil. I knew it was a trap.
I tried hard to resist them, my hands clenched in my lap.

I turned up my computer, listening to “The Voice.”
Those candy bars would not be seen till Halloween—my choice!
My willpower was solid. No candy ruled me.
(If that were true, no kids would now be climbing up my tree.)

Yes, it is true I weakened. I listened to their nags.
I took the candy from the shelf and opened up the bags.
Their wrappers looked so pretty put out for display
In one big bowl so colorful, lying this-a-way

and that-a-way, all mixed and jumbled up together.
No danger of their melting in this cooler weather.
I put them on the table, then put them on a shelf
so I would not be tempted to have one for myself.

When people came to visit, I put them by my bed.
Lest they misunderstand and eat them all instead.
Then when I was sleeping, one tumbled off the top.
I heard it landing with a rustle and a little “plop.”

I opened up one eye and saw it lying there
just one inch from where I lay, tangled in my hair.
Its wrapper was so pretty—foiled and multi-hued.
Some evil force took over as I opened it and chewed!

This started a small avalanche of wrappers on the floor
as I ripped and stuffed & chewed & swallowed more & more & more!
This story is not pretty but has to be confessed.
My only explanation is that I was possessed.

They pound upon my door and wait outside my wall,
but I have no candy for them. No treat for them at all.
Surrounded by the wrappers, bare bowl upon my lap,
I think I’ll just ignore them and take a little nap.

I hear them spilling o’er my wall and dropping down inside.
I try to think of what to do. Consider suicide.
They’re coming in to get me. Beating down my door.
They are intent on blood-letting—the Devil’s evil spore.

I guess it’s not the worst death a gal could ever get.
I’ve heard of much worse endings than death by chocolate!

The dVerse Poets prompt is “October.

“Vitiligo” for Esther’s Writing Prompts

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Vitiligo*

Mighty sol’s ubiquitous in regions that are tropical,
but when it comes to sunlight, I have news that is more topical.
I’m evidence empirical that all folks aren’t created
to lie out in the sun’s rays until their lust is sated
for skin transposed to honey brown from a whitish hue.
For folks like me, such practices simply will not do.

Unlike my lucky college chums, my best friends and my sister,
when I’m exposed to sunlight, I am more prone to blister.
I see them put their swimsuits on and take turns rubbing oil on,
anxious to go greet the sun to get their bake and boil on,
but once they’re spread out on their towels with all adjustments made,
I’ll be covered up instead, sitting in the shade.

*Vitiligo is a chronic autoimmune disorder that causes patches of skin to lose pigment or color. This happens when melanocytes – skin cells that make pigment – are attacked and destroyed, causing the skin to turn a milky-white color. People with vitiligo have no natural protection from the sun.

The prompt for Esther’s Writing Prompts this week is “Shade.”

“Sparrow’s Song” for Sunday Whirl

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Sparrow’s Song

Sparrows that stretch their wings out and flutter branch to branch
migrate for the winter to the barn at Daddy’s ranch.
I ring a bell and they emerge from their hidden places.
Some flutter to my back as I bend down to tie my laces.
I stretch my arm to spread their seed, then try to stand real still
as they execute crash landings to land and  eat their fill.
Others fidget up above, lining the barn’s high beam,
like substitutes awaiting their chance to join the team.
Ferrets  slinking through the hay , their teeth as sharp as lances
keep close watch on wings and beaks, waiting for their chances
to pounce on unsuspecting birds, so memories once sweet
given darker endings, may mean nostalgia’s defeat.

Word menu for the Sunday Whirl this week is: sparrows bell migrate emerge flutter still stretch slinking memories branches fidgeting crash

Out-Joked for SOCS

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BACK GARDEN1

Out-joked

Everyone must know a joker––
plotter, trickster, laugh-provoker
who doesn’t know quite when to stop.
Who needs, in fact, a humor cop
to tell him when he’s done enough––
pulled his ultimate ruse or bluff.

The dribble glass, the rubber poop
placed upon your house’s stoop?
Definitely adolescent
if not actually prepubescent.
Yet still this buffoon thinks he’s funny.
With lists of jokes, he’s over-punny.

Every occasion, every rumor
is met by him with off-base humor.
It’s his role to create sensation
in the most serious conversation.
Exploding cigars, salty gum,
whoopee cushions ‘neath your bum.

No matter how you beg this friend
to bring these antics to their end,
he never seems to listen to
what he’s requested to “not” do.
so when he streaked my garden party,
elegant, refined and arty,

he finally found himself undone
when he’d half-completed his naked run.
Dear friend, when you chose where you stepped,
you should have veered or should have leapt.
When he replaced your rubber poo,
my dog just pulled a joke on you!

 

The SOCS prompt is “Joke.”

Graffiti, for The Sunday Whirl

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Click on photos to enlarge.

Graffiti

Some viewers lift their glasses and drink to genius that
gave birth to every brush stroke. Each dribble and each splat.
They say these shocking images awaken us to see
much more than just one artist’s route to immortality.

Others blame the artist who has had the gall
to spray art uninvited upon a public wall.
They say raw art does nothing to put out raging fires.
Solutions to world problems are not what art inspires.

Prompt words for The Sunday Whirl are: drinks fire wake catastrophe shocking say social drastic world art raw blame

“Forked Tongues” for Weekend Writing Prompt

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Forked Tongues
These messengers speak words
that can slap you awake,
then abandon you
as they return
to the problems
of the privileged rich.

For Weekend Writing Prompt: Speak (limited to 22 words)

Cleanup Crew for SOCS

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Not dead..just stuffed full and taking a rest.

Cleanup Crew

They eke their living out of our scraps
purloined while we are taking naps
or out for walks or just aren’t looking––
so intent upon our cooking
that we fail to see them scamper
(from where they hide behind the hamper)
out to gather crumbs they seek.
But instead, they prompt an “Eek”
as Mom goes one way, they the other
off to find, they hope, another
kitchen where the cook’s more willing
to ignore their needs for filling
rodent jaws and rodent tummies
with some errant human yummies.

The SOCS prompt is eek/eke

“Wordless” for Word of the Day.

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Wordless

I wish that I could wow you with putting prompts to rhyme,
but I seem not to be able to do so at this time.
“Amplify’s” been silenced and refuses to fight back,
while its potential author is revealed as just a hack.

It seems my old acuity at making words behave
has somehow deserted me, branding me a knave.
The truth that I am lacking in *vocabular agility
has left me slightly flummoxed with a new vulnerability.

(*For all I know, some lexicographer’s already dissed
my coinage of a brand new word the dictionaries missed.)
This poet, once ferocious, has been worn down by time.
and I’m thinking in my next life I might come back as a mime.

The Word of the Day prompt is:  “Amplify.”