Category Archives: Poem

Your Dishwasher’s Advocate

For the PAD challenge, we are to write a poem about a machine.

Your Dishwasher’s Advocate

Cycle after cycle, they clean our dirty dishes
yet do we ever think about acceding to their wishes?
Maybe they, too, have appetites, and I sometimes think perhaps,
they were patiently waiting for their favorite scraps.

A bit of rich spaghetti sauce, a dollop of our mousse,
a little bit of buttered bread or rib eye’s savory juice
might have fulfilled their evening’s dreams or might have made their day,
But instead we diligently swab it all away!

No rich reward for faithful servants waiting for our scraps.
No satifsfactory searches for tidbits left in gaps.
And so they go another day, our faithful old machines,
without a taste of hamburgers or beets or nectarines.

They cannot live on water alone. Those soapsuds have no savor.
And so the next time when you scrape, please do your pal a favor.
Leave a few scraps on the plate. Don’t clean too well those tines.
Think about your faithful friend who oh too rarely dines.

Leave your dishwasher a tip—something on which to sup.
Leave wine dregs in your goblets and leave them facing up!
Leave rice grains in your rice bowl. Do not clear that sauce away.
Being less efficient, will make your Maytag’s day.

If your wife makes a kerfuffle over the job you do,
remind her it is you that’s here scraping off the goo.
Take her by the shoulders and deflect her view.
Your dishwasher is grateful for it every time you do!

 

“Chocolate-covered Potato Chips and 90210” for Fandango’s Flashback Friday, Nov 22, 2024

For Flashback Friday, Fandango has asked us to rerun a blog we published on November 22 of a previous year. Mine is from 2014!

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Chocolate-covered Potato Chips and 90210

Thanks be to God for TV that’s evolved beyond Godzilla.
And thanks to him for frozen cream—both praline and vanilla.
Another pleasure is writing in bed. It’s how I start my day.
With no spouse or kids to feed, it’s where I get to stay.
I know that grandkids would be nice, but still I’m rather grateful
that being childless cuts to nil the chances they’ll be hateful.

Chocolate and potato chips, together or alone
are two more guilty pleasures for which I must atone.
I try to limit quantities that pass between my lips,
for if I eat too many, they’re displayed upon my hips.
Another guilty pleasure that’s high upon my list
is a stupid TV show that somehow I just missed

the first time that it came around and which I must admit
is really superficial, although it was once a hit.
Still, I can’t stop watching it when I am all alone—
a guilty pleasure for which I’ve found ways I can atone.
I only watch it from the pool as I do exercise—
computer balanced within view while I aerobicize.

The show I watch is Beverly Hills Nine-Zero-Two-One-Oh.
And that’s about as far as this confession’s gonna go!
I’m sure I’m shrinking brain cells, but I grow them back again
by reading hours of Marcel Proust, and then Anais Nin!
My ending comment must be this sincere beatitude:
for friends who like me as I am, I have great gratitude.

Guilty for my sins and the excesses that are mine—
grateful for the friends who still insist that I am fine
if I never turn out perfect both in looks and my behavior,
I guess the fact that they’re not perfect either is my savior.
Guiltily and gratefully, we all pass through this life,
pudgy from our excesses and battered by our strife.

But that’s how life is patterned, and we all are lucky still
that of our guilty pleasures we’re allowed to have our fill.
Thanks be to our compulsions and life’s excesses of pleasure,
for all our peccadillos end up as life’s greatest treasure.
So, thanks be again for naughty things. We both love and revile them.
With some of them we stuff our mouths. With others, We just dial them.

Just Beyond My Grasp For SOCS, Nov 23, 2024

 

 

Just Beyond My Grasp

When I’ve passed a restless night,
to once more welcome morning light,
I do not leave a lover’s grasp.
No knitted legs need to unclasp.
What time on waking I can afford
is simply spent unwinding cord:
the earbud cord around my neck,
my PC power cord from the wreck
of pillows, comforter and sheet
that somehow, now, are at my feet.
My MacBook Air, just by my shoulder
has come unplugged and so is colder
to my touch. It won’t power on.
Then, when plugged in, my poem is gone.

For SOCS

Rejecting Advice, for the Writer’s Digest Prompt

 

Unsolicited Advice

With buckets of advice and a blizzard of suggestions,
and prolific answers to all of life’s great questions,
he blusters and pontificates and tells us how to live
with advice he never follows, but which, nonetheless, he gives.

He imparts his wisdom to everyone he meets:
from how to run your business to your life between the sheets.
Advice on morals, love and sex (all in his domain)
make even brief encounters such a royal pain.

You know he’ll scratch his whiskers and open up his yap
and once again you will be caught in his vocal trap.
And so you’ve found that at first sight, you must avoid detection
by altering your footsteps to an alternate direction.

For the Writer’s Digest Rejecting Advice prompt.

Night of the Dragon for dVerse Poets

photo with permission from Lachlan Gowen on Unsplash

Night of the Dragon

Behold the dragon, how it flows
from its tail up to its nose.
Thirty feet and thirty arms
move the dragon’s sinuous charms—
its razor teeth, its threatening frown—
through the streets of Chinatown.
On its head, a golden crown.
Its many humps move up and down,
forming valleys, growing hills
while moving over rocks and rills.
Straightening out to cross the bridges
spanning between neighboring ridges.
Never flying through the air,
rising only up the stair.
So many mortals make one beast,
one night a year to roil and feast
on errant spirits wandering out
their vile sentiments to flout,
chancing their ends once more to free
those rotten souls they used to be.
One night of all we form the back
that otherwise the dragons lack.
We form their arms and form their feet,
arousing awe in all we meet.
And thus it happens, once a year,
we become that which most we fear.

For the dVerse Poets prompt, “Dragon.”

Skipped Out, for MVB

 

Skipped Out

It was a wretched theory. They postulated that
if we’d all collaborate, we’d lose all of our fat.
They weren’t very subtle. They gave us tubes of stuff
to squeeze over the food we ate, but never quite enough.
We had to buy the second batch, and prices just kept rising,
but we never lost a pound—a result not surprising.
Later, they skipped out of town—an act our friends found funny.
They told us from the first the only thing we’d lose is money!!!

For MVB: Skipped

Breaking Tradition for FOWC

Breaking Tradition

A tradition is a habit that we’re loath to break,
a memory that our hearts continue stubbornly to make.
It is our continuity, our chain link to the past.
We make a resolution that it’s always going to last.

And yet our lives must segue to what future we might grow.
We cannot drag the past with us wherever we may go
lest it become a ball and chain that keeps us from what may
be an opportunity that may come our way.

Traditions are so comforting. They deal with what has been.
They make tiny departures seem a sort of sin,
but sometimes they just hold us back, keep us from being free,
and we must let loose of tradition to see what we can be.

Revenge can be tradition and one that’s hard to break,
causing backward facing hearts to fester and to ache.
As hard as it may be for us to turn around and heal,
it’s the only course that may enable us to feel.

When we peel away tradition, it gives hearts room to grow.
We plant seeds of new memories and tend them row on row.
The garden of our consciousness so fertile and so vast
that there is room for new traditions as alluring as the past.

 

For FOWC: Traditional

Happy Medium

                                          Happy Medium

I’m no rocket scientist,
but neither do I drool.
I once was an icon––
valedictorian in my school.
Living on a pension,
spending most days on my couch,
I’ve kept my sense of humor
and not become a grouch!!!

For Esther’s “Can you tell a story in. 39 words”   the words are:

  • ICON
  • DROOL
  • PENSION
  • ROCKET
  • COUCH

 

911 for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 679

911

The fire sighs and flips the ravaged timbers to the floor,
sends soaked ashes swirling in currents toward the door.
Blue flames lick at skins of walls, then weave around the beams,
trying to escape the fire fighter’s streams
as they emerge in masks from the house’s inner places,
assassins of those flames who’ve chosen not to show their faces.
Thus is the conflagration robbed of its power and beauty
by this crew that sees extermination as its duty.

For The Sunday Whirl
The prompt words are sighs fire flip ravaged blue floor emerge masks ashes soak skin weave

“Nostalgia” For the Sunday Whirl Wordle #669

Nostalgia

Memory is a strong vine up which we keep on vanishing—
every upward movement, more of the present banishing.
Toward  the top, our back flashes set up such a yearning,
tripping sighs and anguish that set our hearts to churning.

Basking in past glories makes us turn a blind eye to 
all we might tap into looking at the world anew.
Living in the past instead of seizing on today
I fear creates a “now” that we choose to throw away.

 

For The Sunday Whirl today, the prompt words are: back flash vanishing tap top trip yearning blind sigh vine strong fear   Image by Luis Galvez on Unsplash