Category Archives: Poem

This Year’s Additions

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This Year’s Additions

They jockey for attention and steal the old dog’s ball.
When I try to calm them down, it does no good at all.
To get any quiet time, I have to lock them out.
Paths worn through the garden show where they’ve run about.

They commandeer my deck chairs in spite of my requests
that they should surrender them to my party guests.
They  make off with my underwear for a tug-of-war
so it has been three times now I’ve had to order more.

Puppies are enchanting when one first gains custody,
but they jump up on my lap each time I try to pee.
When I go to bed at night, exhausted from my day,
that’s the time they want to join me for frenetic play.

They walk across my laptop to burrow in my hair.
They are an energizer bunny sort of pair.
My sister says I’m crazy. Two puppies in one year?
But the first one was so tiny and the second was so dear.

Their delight in each other so delighted me
that I had to add them to our family tree.
Three dogs and two cats, it’s true, is probably too many.
The only thing that would be worse is if I hadn’t any!!!

 

Prompt words today are path, custody, enchanting, jockey and ball.

Home for the Holidays

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Home for the Holidays

The advent of a new year has me in a tizzy,
feeling discombobulated, very nearly dizzy.
For no matter how experienced I am in greeting new years,
It suddenly occurs to me that there are very few years
left for me to celebrate, so I will not roam 
far from that place I love best. I’ll celebrate at home.

Prompt words today are tizzy, advent, experienced.

Plethora

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Plethora

If I had any gumption, I’d attack that backlog of
poems that I have written about life and death and love.
Fantastic in their numbers, those poems exist in piles,
bound in three-ring binders and squeezed into hanging files.

Thy cluster in my consciousness, swim nightly through each dream.
They are both strength and weakness as they stretch out, ream on ream.
They allow me no real leisure, for they’re everywhere I look,
begging for confinement in a magazine or book.
They crave to be collected between front and back cover,
but in spite of resolutions, I  simply write another.

This poem and these photos are  no exaggeration. I have 13 file cabinet drawers plus one big bin and a few piles, binders and stacks that contain poems and stories I’ve run off, or ideas for new ones.  I have no idea now many poems I have in my blog and computer that I’ve never run off. 

Prompt words today are fantastic, weakness, backlog, gumption, allow and cluster.

Conjoinings (Interspecies and Otherwise)

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Conjoinings (Interspecies and Otherwise)

Spiders have spiderlings, cats have their kittens.
Elbow-length gloves perhaps produce mittens.
Whenever a boy cockroach happens to mount her,
a girl cockroach procreates right on my counter!

Such coteries tend to insist on inbreeding,
but the world’s solidarity comes from cross-seeding.
Thus, mermaids lure sailors onto the rocks
for intercourse better confined to their docks.

When horses and zebras conjoin, then of course,
the end is a hebra, or perhaps  a zorse?
A tiger from Asia and lion from Niger
might call their offshoot a tion or liger.

The tone of this poem? I admit it is crass.
It ends with a haddock  shtupping a bass.
resulting in baddocks or perhaps a hass.
Another stanza? Bet you’re glad that I pass!!

Prompt words are spiderling, tone, solidarity, coterie, counter and dock.

Moonshine, Wordle 584, Dec. 25, 2022

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Moonshine

Lustrous moonshine goddess slipping through the stars,
heading off for liaisons with Jupiter and Mars,
songs written in your honor spread moon dust in their lines.
Moonflowers crane their necks and twist upon their vines.

Eyes that scan the heavens as you grow pale and wan
grow stony charting courses where you may have gone.
At the stroke of midnight, they too will fade away—
pale bodies spread upon their cots under the moon’s faint ray.

bwarren posted these prompts on The Sunday Whirl: Wordle 584
star scan body dust follow grow stroke stony moonshine goddess song slip

Scrooge Holds Forth on Christmas

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Scrooge Holds Forth on Christmas

It can be a bit frenetic, this yearly Yuletide season,
creating a fiasco beyond any rhyme or reason.
It carries us along on a tide of fir and holly,
demanding we be spirit-filled and reverent and jolly

until we’re nearly saturated with the Yultide spirit,
kind of sick of Christmas before we’re even near it.
All this peace and loving can be a royal pain—
pine needles barely cleared away before they’re here again.

We’re blanketed in blessings, gift-wrapped and over-gay
in an over-decorated binge-filled treacle holiday.
Oh for just one Christmas without reindeer-decked pajamas,
on a sun-filled beach somewhere—perhaps in the Bahamas!!!!

Prompts today are Yuletide, blanket, nearly, fiasco, carry and royal.

Over Zealous Under Zero

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Over Zealous Under Zero

The icicles are monstrous, yet I’m being diplomatic
and trying not to alter my friend’s hopeful schematic.
Feeling if I squelch her passionate ambition
that in the future I will suffer some sort of attrition.

So I’ll take a hike with her in regions rough and hilly,
never mentioning that I’m feeling over-chilly.
My rating of both temperature and walk is less than zero,
but I’ll keep my mouth shut, thereby ranking as a hero!

Prompts today are icicle, diplomatic, rating, attrition, monstrous and so. Last photo by Dino Reichmuth on Unsplash. Rest, by me.

Egg Carton Flowers: Art Day at Judy’s House–Wordle 582

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(Click on Photos to enlarge.)

Egg Carton Flowers: Art Day at Judy’s House

Fairy breath and greedy flush, scissors, paper glue—
they go about the mutual task of everything they do.
Twin sisters, they spill out in life, perpetually torn
apart since that rude splitting the day that they were born.

One demands the pink paint, the other requests blue—
their lips stained orange by Cheetos, fingers covered by goo.
Voices raspy with excitement, they call each other’s bluff
as their grandma hisses fondly, “Girls, that is enough!”

The yellowing sun descends to orange as they end their day
out on the back terrace where they have gone to play.
Safe now that frisky littler dogs are locked behind the screen,
they pet the Scottie’s matted hair, soothed by his gentler mien.

Inside, their older sister helps us clear away their messes.
Not the first time, right? I ask, “No, not quite,” she  confesses.
She fondly rinses paint brushes and points out the incredible—
blue fingerprints on cookies that someone had turned inedible.

The prompt words are bluff torn spill yellowing fairy breath greedy flush soothed safe hiss raspy for Wordle 583 on The Sunday Whirl
Last photo by Harriet Hart. Others by me.

When my good friend Harriet asked if I’d think up a project for her visiting grandaughters, I was pleased to have an excuse to get to know these lovely young ladies. Egg carton flowers it was!!!!

Rude Reception

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Rude Reception

I don’t forgive the kidney punch, sharp and sure and quick.
Your sapless smile an icicle, cold and stiff and sick.
Once they’ve repaired the damage and my tactics I’ve refined,
I’ll return your greeting, in fervor and in kind.

Prompt words are sharp, repair, icicle, sapless, kidney and don’t. Image borrowed from the internet.

Vicissitudes

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Vicissitudes

Vicissitudes of fortune occur to everyone.
At the very best of times, they snuff out all your fun.
You find the perfect dress and shoes then find that you are cursed
with a hellacious haircut that presents you at your worst.

Neither fame nor fortune is a perpetual state.
The only constant for each one is that they will abate.
You hop up on the carousel and grab the golden ring,
but can’t hold on forever to any precious thing.

Luck ebbs and flows like tidal waves, advancing and departing—
an ending just as sure in life as every action’s starting.
So get used to life’s vagaries, for you may be sure
that they are the only things certain to endure.

Prompt words today are hellacious, neither, vicissitude, grab, haircut and hop.