Category Archives: Poem

Memory

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Memory

The excavation of our memories can glue us to the past,
unearthing shards of former lives into which we’ve been cast.
Our mind a virtual theater that draws us through its curtain,
sometimes half-remembering and hardly ever certain
of what is fact and what is mind’s creative fabrication—
the truth eluding us a bit in time’s confabulation.
Its draw narcotic, we accede once more to its allure.
Is it history or fable? How can we know for sure?

 

Prompts for the day are theater, allure, elude, excavation.Second Image by Tsunami Green on Unsplash. All others by me.

The Behavioral Linguist in Love: May 17, 2022

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The Behavioral Linguist* in Love

A thoughtful, scientific man, he chose his words with care.
No ordinary words would do. Only ones most rare.
He first spied her in the springtime, finally met her in the fall—
a simply gorgeous maiden—comely, willowy and tall.
But months of choosing his first words seem to have done him in.
What should have been his saving grace turned out to be a sin.

Enthusiastic in his love, he just had to express
his much-gone-over feelings about her loveliness.
He’d formerly determined not to use just any word,
but his final declaration turned out to be absurd.
He should have called her beautiful and just left it at that,
for when he called her pulchritudinous, she thought that he meant fat!

 

*Note: New to the world of behavioral science, Behavioral Linguistics is the science-based use of language to persuade. It’s rooted in nudge theory combined with psychology, sociolinguistics, and principles of marketing. Language is a powerful way to change behavior.

Prompts today are behavioral, enthusiastic, pulchritude, fall.  Images by Fabio Lucas and   Mandy Zhang on Unsplash.

Word Friendly

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Word Friendly
I have a rabid interest in snazzy ways of talking.
Sauntering or loping are more interesting than walking.
Dew is more refined than mere sweat or perspiration.
In short, words are much juicier infused with inspiration.

I isolate my favorite words, then bring them back together,
joining unacquainted words with hyphens as a tether.
I guess that I write poetry as an excuse to use them,
for words become your friends as you’re struggling to fuse them.

(If you’d like an illustration of this type of word-joining,  go HERE.

Prompt words today are guess,  rabid, isolate,  dew and  snazzy,

Flower Power

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Flower Power

As it slipped off the shelf, the flower gave a growl.
It never intended to go on the prowl.

It’s against flower ethics to go off on one’s own,
unopened, unblossomed and not fully grown.

No flower’s a star. They’re all one of the bunch,
but given a shot at it, I have a hunch

that beneath every garden, the flowers below
are driven to rise up—to open and crow,

to greet the new morning and bask in its heat,
and that then they ‘d be off if they only had feet.

Their one chance at freedom is if they are clipped
and bunched into bunches, then bartered and shipped

to  exotic places where the minute they’re sold,
they’ll be off to adventures and their world will unfold.

Then if perchance they are placed up on shelves,
they may tumble to earth to be all by themselves.

Short-lived as they are, they might think as they fall
from their limited knowledge, that they’ve seen it all!!

 

For Sunday Swirl’s Wordle 553, the prompt words are: star shelf growl slip open flower crow against prowl beneath beat shot.

Wet Alibi

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Wet Alibi

Two thunderous bolts of lightning split the midnight sky.
No one was here to hear them. Only the dogs and I.
The priggish cats were nestled in a knot deep in their bed,
stomach against stomach, inverted tail to head.

Rain fell down in buckets. Lights flickered off and back,
then off again and all the world descended into black.
When some derelict wiring succumbed to the first drop,
I tried to phone a report  to the electricity cop,

but not a person answered at the guard house or Con Ed,
so I finally accepted that the whole world had gone dead.
No wifi meant no internet. No music. No TV.
A twelve-hour outage led to nil blogging activity.

And that is why the phone just rang with an inquiry.
Forgottenman was wondering what had become of me.
Was I not going to post? So I hastened to the job.
The lights are on. It’s time to feed the hungry blogster mob!


True story, all of it., except for the poetic license of calling the Mexican electrical commission (CFE)  Con Ed.  The rhyme, you know….Over 16 hours without electricity. My story and I’m sticking to it. Actually, half of the house was in brownout and the rest totally without electricity. Evidently this was an area-wide outage, but just in spots. All the houses around me were dark. Below me there were lights and this was true in all the villages along the lake. Weird.

Check out this post if you want to see some hard rain: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2020/08/17/sudden-hard-rain/

 

Prompt words today are thunderous,  active, derelict, prig,
accept.

Revolt at Walmart

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Revolt at Walmart

Give us the proper rebate if you want us to behave.
We have our coupons in our hands and we’re not going to cave.
It is not iniquity to ask for what you’re due.
Accede to our demands or we’re going to mount a coup.

So what if it’s a misprint in the paper? Not our fault.
Produce what you offered, for we’re not going to halt.
Although you say to honor it would amount to a steal,
20 for 1 seems to us a reasonable deal!

Prompt words for the day are proper, beam, rebate, iniquity and behave.

Gardener

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Gardener

As life tautens its string and pulls me along,
I delay thoughts of my funeral gong
with a story, a rhyme, a poem or a song,

creativity being the one way I know
to write my own ending for the end of the show.
Our quota of years, that cessation of flow,

that furtive departure, that summons to go,
that human surrender to the undertow,
need not be an ending to all that we know.

That’s why I have chosen to come here and stow
what little I’ve learned in an orderly row
of words on this page, following head to toe,

that tell parts of my life, be they pleasure or woe.
I plant them here, hoping that they will grow
into tall verdant meadows that you’ll want to mow.

Prompt words today are creativity, human, furtive, tauten and quota.

Words for a Formerly Rejected Would-be Lover

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Words for a Formerly Rejected Would-be Lover

The prospects are quite iffy that you’ll shift my view,
but come equipped with custard and I’ll take a spin with you.
We’ll see if we have anything in common other than
a taste for boiled custard and a mania for flan.

Prompt words today are shift, spin, custard, iffy and equipped. Image by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash.

Face Off!

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Face Off!

It’s always there in front of me, greeting people first.
With having to live up to it, I always have been cursed.
When I want to look pious, it breaks out in a grin
revealing that within me there is a bit of sin.

It blushes when that boy walks in that I don’t want to know it.
I’m trying to be mysterious, and then I go and blow it!
It heats up and blushes when I’m trying to be cool.
How can something a part of me break every single rule?

When I doll up in my finest, then spend an hour on it,
adding shadow, blush and lashes, it decides to grow a zit!
I’m tired of facing up to its erratic bad behavior.
It seems to be my enemy when I most need a savior.

I’d like to go before it to decide what people see
before my face inserts itself, claiming to be me.
Then Covid comes along and gives me everything I ask.
Ironic that it takes a plague to furnish me a mask.

 

Prompt words today are faces, heat, pious, erratic, doll.

Big Mac (For The Sunday Whirl Wordle 552)

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Big Mac

That  alchemy turns lead to gold may be more than lore,
or so says Modern Physics*, but MacDonald’s does much more
by making gold and silver out of snack bar food,
feeding Big Macs, shakes and fries to a hungry brood.
Drunk fools go there for coffee, lonely hearts go to make friends.
Why we greet the golden arches more or less depends
on what we feel we’re lacking. Sometimes, company will do.
Or you may need a hamburger, in fact you may need two.
After you have plowed your furrows, changing clods to dirt,
wipe the soil from your hands and change your soiled shirt
and head out to McDonald’s. You’ll never rue the day
when you order Macs and fries and tuck them all away.
You may have flunked your physics test, my dear, but never mind.
The golden arches provides comfort of the tastebud kind.

*“What is Alchemy? – Live Science https://www.livescience.com › 39314-alchemy Mar 24, 2016 — Alchemy is the ancient practice of trying to turn lead into gold. Modern physics equipment may finally make that quest a reality.”

Wordle prompts for The Sunday Whirl: 552 : sometimes never snack bar drunk fools gold silver alchemy physics dirt clod.  Image by Amirali Mirhashemian on Unsplash.