Category Archives: Poem

Blast from the Blog 2020..Retribution

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Retribution

I swallow screams for dinner,
hold my tongue the whole meal through.
I’m told I’ll have to eat my words
if I let slip a few.
I’m choking back the clever things
that I want to tell,
but all my smart rejoinders
simply will not jell.

“Better seen than heard,” they say,
and yet they do not see me.
If I’m not allowed to speak,
how will I ever be me?
When I grow up, I’ll talk and talk.
Never will I be quiet.
If someone tries to shut me up,
I simply will not buy it.

By then my folks will be real old.
To shush me? They won’t dare.
If they do, I’ll shush them back,
and put them in a chair.
I’ll make them face the corner
and tell them to be quiet.
And if they say to eat my words?
I’ll say I’m on a diet!!!

Night for Day

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Me, at age 2, journeying into inner spaces.

Night for Day

Night holds me like a basket, shaping answers to my dreams
as all the truths my days have taught leak out of me in streams.
One reality of heart chanting truths that stay,
while truths of badges, guns and sirens slowly pulse away.
Our startled world thus vanishes and for some hours dies
as sleep sweeps over us and soothes day’s agonies with sighs.

For The Sunday Whirl Wordle, the word prompts are: siren chanting pulse sighs night basket answers heart shape badge stay

Complicated by Nature For Blast from the Blog, Aug 14, 2020

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Complicated by Nature

I find my mind keeps spinning until my brain grows weary
ever since I foolishly googled “chaos theory.”

While fatalists declare the world caught up in its rut,
the chaos theorists have theories I cannot rebut

wherein each thing duplicated differs from the last
because of other factors than the mold from which they’re cast.

And suddenly I have excuses for each thing I do.
Why my cake has fallen, and why my bras turned blue

the last time that I washed them the detergent was the same,
and yet something perhaps had changed–chaos theory is to blame!!!

Each snowflake varies from last, each flower is unique.
It seems that our creator demands a bit of tweak

in everything created. Chaos affects  everything.
I guess that Mother Nature wants to keep it interesting!!!

“Mame” for dVersePoets

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Mame

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Mame

Compose a ballad for Auntie Mame,
famous of body and of name,
and make the music slow and sad
as we revere the moves she had;
for all those parts she chose to wiggle
eventually began to jiggle.

Those shocking movements that won her fame
were finally ones she had to tame,
and all the fellows who once came
to see her at her sexy game
seem to have vanished, to have flown
once her parts moved on their own.

No matter that she lived by art—
how wide her fame, how big her heart—
once revered parts began to swing,
I fear her peeping Toms took wing.
What wives saw as depravity,
I fear she lost to gravity.

Yet years that held her in their sway
could not take her spirit away.
In some assisted living facility,
she still displays agility.
Her movements, true, may be much slower
and certain displayed parts much lower.

Her scarves are larger and tightly wrapped
where once they fluttered and they flapped,
but still admirers hoot and holler
and grace her g string with a dollar.
So sing her praises far and wide.
She’s still the tart she was inside.

Mame..for dVerse Poets

Classic Material from Aug 11, 2018 Breaking Her Diet

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Breaking Her Diet

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Breaking Her Diet

I measure her cat food with care from the vat,
but she has such an aptitude, my little cat
for flushing out lizards and others like that.
With delicate paw thrusts, she gives them a bat
’til they barely know where it is that they’re at,
then unleashes her claws for a more severe pat.

Be it lizard or bird or scorpion or rat,
she defeats it as though it were merely a gnat
and lays it out nicely on my front door mat:
one scorpion sting less or a feather for my hat,
then returns to the stool where she formerly sat,
licking her chops, and that’s why she’s so fat!!!

Jumping Jack Flash for Quadrille 353

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Jumping Jack Flash

Jumping Jimminy, Jumping Jack.
It really seems like there’s no lack
of “jump” in our vocabulary.
Jump a car? Constabulary
will be there within a flash
if you’ve decided to earn cash
to add to your illegal gain
by jumping on the felon train!

For dVerse Poets

Netherworld Chorus, for The Sunday Whirl

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Netherworld Chorus

Bone needles weave the cord that draws us to the underworld–
that pit of desolate terrors where sorrow is unfurled,
in pleas for absolution–– futile as they are  crazed ––
expressed in screams of torment by voices that are raised
in spirals toward a populace just currently recruited
to those nether regions to which they, too, are better suited–
that temple where they’ll have, they think, leisure to simply sin
without blame or sanction, but instead, will join the din.
If my words have sparked your interest, you might come along
to furnish us a chorus  for our infernal song.

For The Sunday Whirl Wordle 768, the words are: screams desolate they’bone sparks s voices  underworld spiral  current. (Illustration made with assistance from AI.)

“August 8” for the Throwback Edition

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This is the reblog of one of my posts from today’s date in 2016. Still a vaid comment, I think, as much of what I predicted has come about.

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The Lap

Mothers with children in your lap,
snuggled safely for their nap,
or joggers slowing down their laps
so their sons can fill the gaps
and catch up to take their father’s hands,
consider parents in other lands
as well as children of your own.
Consider what seeds might be sown.

Those who assign Hillary
to whipping post and pillory
bring charges that are spurious
which is especially curious
when the other candidate
who spreads these messages of hate
has led a life luxurious,
exploitative and usurious.

When he claims to be for the masses,
how can we be such senseless asses
to vote for this self-serving fool––
misogynistic, crude and cruel?
How can you listen and not see
how dangerous this man could be?
His fake statistics, groundless rap
spewed from his seat in luxury’s lap?

Please with the election nearing,
consider what you should be fearing.
I hope that every dad and mom
pictures his finger on the bomb.
Do you want this master of derision
making that supreme decision?
This man who overlooks the facts,
and simply rushes out and acts—

could act to end the world for good
and thereby end your parenthood.

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“Lazy Bones” for Friday Writings

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Lazy Bones

The greater portion of the day
had already passed away
by the time she raised her head
and deigned to quit her lonely bed.
She fed the cat and fed the dog,
then hit the button and fed her blog.
The words poured out like kibble, then
she went back to bed again!
It’s true she is a lazy bones,
ignoring doorbells, texts and phones
until it is her choice to rise
to face the possible surprise
that the night might still present—
wondering where the daylight went.
‘”Here sleeps,” her epitaph  will say,
“one who slept her life away.”

In case you are wondering,

(This is not me. I’m up at eight
to answer pounding on my gate.
It is my alter-ego, perhaps—
that side of me that I let lapse—
that draws me into daylight naps
and tempts me to ignore the phone.
That asks for afternoons alone.)

For Poets & Storytellers United, the prompt was “Bones.”

Stubborn as a . . . . for “Classic Material” Prompt

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This blog was published on Aug 6 ten years ago.


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Stubborn as a . . . .

I must admit I’m stubborn, argumentative and such.
All these adverse qualities have me in their clutch.
But my mother’s from Missouri and my dad’s family is Dutch,
so they’re  the ones to blame for it, thank you very much!

If you call it tenacity it ends up sounding better.
I go from being mulish to being a go-getter,
and my stubborn tendencies cease to be a fetter.
They serve me as an asset instead of as a debtor.

As dogged as a pit bull,  determined as a cat.
A bull can be most bullish, you can’t argue much with that.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink,
and nothing’s stubborn as a pig, no matter what you think.

So if you say I’m mulish, it’s neither here nor there.
Stubborn is one quality that’s not so very rare.
And when you point a finger and say I’m being rancorous,
the animal you’re channeling might be just as cantankerous!