Except for the photos of La Manzanilla beach, all of the photos are from my yard. The first photo is of the fin of a needlefish near sunset. You can see it again in the second to last photo. At a certain stage of darkness, my camera tends to translate darkness as rose pink. Thus the pink glow in the photo of the palm tree.
Dreamworld
My dreams are irregular and I cannot control them.
Every night I enter them in order to patrol them.
Sometimes I feel marooned there, like a miner with no pick,
a writer with no pencil, a conductor with no stick.
Vanity is left behind. No room for it in dreams.
Life’s garment that we’ve sewn with care is ripped out at its seams.
It does no good to gripe or moan that you have lost control,
for dreams move us outside ourselves as though that is their goal.
On the outside looking in, our life becomes a role
in which we play ourself in our quest to find our soul.
Prompts today are dreams, irregular, maroon, gripe, miner and vanity.
Process of Elimination
The child asked her grandpa to teach her how to spell,
and he could not deny her, though he knew good and well
that spelling class for him had been a different sort of Hell.
They had not been his forte, the chalk board and the book,
and so this was a challenge he timorously took.
He had to find a method to help, by hook or crook!
He said to make a menu of all the words she sought
and he would make a list of all the spellings they were not—
a reverse teaching method that, thankfully, she bought!
So, she gave her assent to all his ballyhoo,
discounting his misspellings of “tuthbrush” “taribul” “hoo,”
on her route to finding spellings that were new.
Thus she learned to overlook solutions that he sold her
in the loving ill-contrived way he sought to mold her
and used the dictionary, ruling out spellings he’d told her.
Prompts today are: timorous, toothbrush, ballyhoo, assent, spell and menu.
Boss
I.
Do I belong to my body or does it belong to me?
II.
When I guard its health and safety, I am its owner.
III.
But when it fails, I am its slave.
For dVerse Poets: Three-Way Split: Bodyguard, body, guard
See how others responded to the prompt HERE.
Improving on the Masters
Surreptitiously, I raise the quill to make a thin gray line
to festoon the drawing that is not even mine,
then tuck my small utensil securely in my purse.
Nightly I make this journey, and nightly I rehearse
what I will say if caught at last, imagining the worse.
The art museum’s climate—chill and dry and dark
gives way to summer’s damp heat as I hurry through the park,
find my car and drive away, speeding ever faster
lest I be finally detected, improving on a master.
Prompt words today are festoon, surreptitiously, quill, utensil, thin, climate.
Turn About
His love is intransitive with no particular focus.
He finds marriage an oddity, monogamy hocus pocus.
He follows neither law nor norm and constantly reminds
her that he’ll make no love troth that promises or binds.
Carving out a life with him would be no easy task
and so she neither taunts nor begs. Doesn’t suggest or ask
for any oaths of loyalty or fealty or marriage.
For them, no orange blossoms and no baby carriage.
They’ll simply wander on through life standing slightly apart,
with no soulful joining of property or heart.
But it hasn’t occurred to him that any night or day
she might be the one who decides to slip away.
Prompt words are intransitive, carve, oddity, taunt, remind and law. Image by Elliot Reyna on Unsplash.
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.
Prompt words today are whiskers, sheet, prolific, bluster, bucket and blizzard. Image by Roberto Quezada on Unsplash.
Kudzu
By the statue of the satyr where the kudzu is the thickest,
I toil pulling roots out, and I swear I am the quickest.
Every place I see the vine, I vow that I will best it.
I remove it from the soil, conquering it lest it
cover all my property from here up to the sea,
knowing if it had its way, that it would cover me!!!
Prompt words today are satyr, place, kudzu, toil, root and me.
School Reunion
We’re grateful for the tiger in his ancient baseball shirt.
He’s still sliding into bases while we’re dishing out the dirt.
Non-Trumper against Trumper, human rightist against bigot,
all the ways we’ve grown apart, gushing from the spigot.
When the debate gets heated, he brings about a shift,
repeating old glories until we get his drift
and switch our conversation way back to the past
to all those high school memories that thankfully still last
and that turn the party back to what it should have been:
turning old friends back to what they all were way back when.
Prompts today are heater, party, grateful, tiger and shift. Image by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash.
Bugbear
My bugbear really is a bear, but it does more than bug me.
When I take a walk in woods, I fear that one will hug me.
I shake in terror every time I hear a dry branch crack,
afraid that I might have a bear descend upon my back.
My footsteps are deliberate. I do not want attention,
fearing that a grizzly bear will demand my detention.
At church camp I stayed with the group as we walked to chapel,
imagining a black bear with his sharp claws like a scalpel
ripping through my backpack and shredding through my tee,
getting down to business. Getting down to me.
When father saw something was wrong as he heard my confession,
he said that i could tell him all, that it was his profession
to listen to the foibles and the fears of kids like me.
Whatever worries I might have, he could set me free.
And so I told everything—my excessive worry
that I might encounter something clawed and toothed and furry.
Then he disqualified my fears and did it in a hurry,
by saying that God put no bears in central Missouri!!!!
Prompts today are bugbear, profession, disqualified, deliberate, shake, chapel. Image by Mana on Unsplash.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 