Category Archives: Poetry

Nightly Ritual

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Nightly Ritual

A fleeting shadow on the wall, what do you make of that?
Another and another joins this swirling mass of bat.
Fortuitous destruction, they swarm across the lake.
What an impressive undulating constant stream they make.
They go to eat mosquitos in the farther fields they roam,
leaving only guano here closer to their home.
The wellbeing they foster, I fear is far afield.
Here at home there’s not a single benefit  they yield.
They sleep by day then hurry off on nightly winged weavings,
leaving me, with broom and scrub brush, dealing with their leavings.

Prompt words  today are fortuitous, shadow, wellbeing, destruction and bat.
Also, for Granny’s BOTD.

Love Poem in a Time of Worldwide Dispute

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Love Poem in a Time of Worldwide Dispute

When other wondrous words continue to be broken,
let us still retain one word to be our token.
While all previous words just argue and discuss,
Let the only word that we require just be “us.”

Happy 9 year anniversary, Forgottenman!

Words for the day are wonder, continue, previous, broken.

Religion and Politics Don’t Compute

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Religion and Politics Don’t Compute

Your infatuation is a blasphemy of sorts.
How could you so revere a leader who consorts
with pedophiles and listens to dictators and Russians?
Are you not aware of the obvious repercussions?
As we commence a new election, there are other people praying
that your misguided leader no longer will be braying.

 

Prompt words for the day are commence, blasphemy, infatuation and listen.

Wanderlust

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Wanderlust

When I was a little girl, no more than just a snip,
I longed to be up in the air or on a sailing ship.
I lusted for adventure––for travel and for more.
I brooded over my dull life––such a crushing bore.
At five I was a dreamer. A backyard visionary.
I imagined me as gypsy, tourist or missionary.
My fantasies weren’t random. In all of them I traveled.
Year after year more restless and wandering dreams unraveled.

Tarzan was my hero and Superman my crush––
their journeys through the jungle or air currents a rush.
I longed for all their freedom––to fly and move at will.
All of their adventures dreamed from my windowsill.
All night I took such pilgrimages over hills and ridges,
crossing raging rivers over extension bridges.
At sixteen I sneaked out at night in my father’s car
and drove for hours through the night, going just so far

that I could be back home before he arose at five
to snuggle back into my bed in our familial hive.
Then slowly I transitioned into who I longed to be.
I swung down from the branches of my family tree.
Trips to far-off places: Australia and Japan,
Africa, Sri Lanka, Bali and Bataan
all came true. As time passed, I ended the charade
of my stationary life and joined the grand parade.

The world one grand excursion, for many years I quested,
thinking that the life that I was born to could be bested,
until at last I learned the truth that what I journeyed for
was simply to unlock the lock and open up that door
that led me deep into myself to find that private world
that lived inside me all those years, so securely curled
that I only found it by first venturing afar.
Thus do we wander far afield to discover who we are.

Prompt words today are transition, brood, random and snip.

 

The Other Side of the Story

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The Other Side of the Story

I think it’s just fair dinkum that you suffer repercussions
from the things you said to me during our last discussions.
I grant that breaking up is something that is hard to do,
but for sheer brutality, I give the prize to you.
I must say it’s unfathomable that you have forgotten
all those infidelities to which you’d never cotton.
I hate to raise old issues that we’d both rather ignore,
but before you pick your suitcase up to storm out of the door,
I feel I must remind you that the suitcase that you’ve packed
does not belong to you but is my favorite, in fact.
And the car you might intend to drive away in in a huff
packed with all “your” furniture and other handy stuff,
is registered to me, in fact, and all that’s packed inside
was paid for by my paycheck, and so it will reside
right here with me as you embark on your lonely shuffle
out into the cold with your belongings in a duffle.
Ta ta my dear malingerer, I hope that you do well
as you descend from easy street down to your private hell.

Prompt words for today are repercussions and  dinkum,
and, since Your Daily Word hasn’t published their August prompts yet, I’m going to use the three prompts of theirs that I missed on the 26th, 27th and 28th while I didn’t have internet connection for three days: Raise, ignore and unfathomable.

Dear Son

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Dear Son

Everything exhausts me. I’ve lost my zip and moxie,
so I’m surrendering control and giving you my proxy.
You can handle matters––earthshaking or mundane.
Having to make up my mind has grown to be a pain.
Today began my countdown for withdrawing from my life.
I’m hiding from decisions, the news and other strife,
compressing the world’s problems into a tiny ball
and hiding it someplace obscure that I will not recall.
I’ll binge-watch old TV shows like Dynasty and Friends
from their initial episodes right up to their ends.
I’m sleeping in ‘til ten o’clock, going to sleep at eight,
throwing away my calendar. I need not know the date.
Here are my credit cards and checkbook. Do with them what you will.
Run away to the Bahamas or pay my water bill.

I’m relying on your character and inborn need to please.
If you don’t pay the light bill, I guess that I’ll just freeze.
Please don’t report your payments. Don’t bother me at all.
Do not text or Facebook. Don’t tweet or Skype or call.
From here on in my life, as planned, is going to be a breeze.
No cooking or dish-washing. I’ll eat takeout Chinese
for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I’ll just do what I please––
I’ll rock for hours in rockers, my cat upon my knees.
I’ll have no need for intercourse. I’m cancelling the phone.
I’ll fill my life with pastimes that I can do alone:
Sudoku and Solitaire, crosswords and jigsaw puzzles––
no lady friends, no social sites. No kisses and no nuzzles.
Type two Agoraphobia is what they’ll say I’m suffering.
But only you and I will know that I am simply buffering.

 

I’ve been without phone and internet for two days.I’m posting this at a local restaurant.

Prompts for today are proxy, mundane, countdown and compress.

Transmogrification

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Transmogrification

All our rites of passage wherein we choose a route
different from our life before–a new way that will suit
the person that we will become in the bye and bye—
a way that’s calculated to stump and mystify
those who cannot understand how we might want to switch—
why we have that need to change—to scratch that travel itch.
We scout out new horizons, travel uncharted roads.
Change our occupations, alter our abodes.
Thus does our universe expand and thus, so, do our lives.
In variety perpetual, evolution thrives.

Prompt words for the day are passage, switch, scout and mystify.

Star

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photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash. Used with permission.

Star

When asked to elaborate on his fame-plagued life,
he only mentioned family—his folks and kids and wife.
His whole battery of movies went without a mention,
and when they broached the subject, the air grew thick with tension.
“If you only rate yourself by how you earn your keep,”
he said, “you dig a trench that’s wide but isn’t very deep.
My work was just a scribble on the margins of my life.
Those roles I played of other people’s lives, I fear were rife
with violence and sadness, full of passion and its ills,
but they were all fiction just meant to pay the bills.

The story of my life was written out in grocery lists,
outings with my children, that woman that I kissed
at the least two times a day—each morning and each night.
My fame was a reflection of a deeper light.
The true role of my life was one that had nobody writing it,
no director or producer or studio inciting it.
It seems these days that what we seek is just escape and fiction.
We don’t have to live ourselves–a mere contrived depiction
of other people’s lives and thoughts more valid than our own,
preferring fruits of other lives more than the ones we’ve grown.
So though the meaning of my films are constantly debated,
the roles that mattered most to me were ones that I created.”

 

Word prompts today are elaborate, battery, yourself and scribble.

Short Story

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Short Story

Have you built a final fortress behind the winding wall
so you need not deal with this crazy world at all?
Is your lofty Shangri-la an adequate escape
from the headlines of the day—the raw world’s rub and scrape?
Have you left behind the saga of this noisy world
to hide out in your quiet cave where you are snugly curled
in your Barclay lounger, an old cat on your lap,
your only excitement rubbing against its nap?

How the needles click and clack as you knit and purl,
remembering small triumphs from when you were a girl.
No need for social intercourse or charity or giving.
Each year you knit out a life that contains less living,
striving for an entity devoid of stress and trouble,
sealed up neat and tidy in your private bubble.
This is really living, you tell yourself each day—
loneliness the only price that you have to pay.

 

Prompt words today were lofty, escape, quiet and saga.

My Weirdest Post Ever. Sorry.

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Prodigy

He shook his bag of marbles at me in a jocular fashion.
It seems this childhood game is his secret guilty passion.
He had faith that eventually I would slake his thirst,
in spite of my conviction that marbles is the worst
game ever invented, for you see rampant sciatica
coupled with my daily dependence on Sal Hepatica
made my kneeling difficult, uncomfortable, and
rendered it most difficult, afterwards, to stand.

But his most stubborn diligence in begging for a bout
at last contradicted my reluctance and my doubt.
I picked me out a shooter and commenced to knuckle down—
the fact we played for keepsies occasioning my frown.
But it seems I am a prodigy—most artful with my thumb.
It wasn’t very long until he realized how dumb
it was to introduce me to this game that hurt my ribs
bending low to shoot at his dragonflies and mibs.

First I won his cats eye and then I won his aggie.
And when I won his shooter, I fear I became braggie.
In the end, I won at that game that he called ringer
by making a maneuver that proved to be a zinger.
And my friend the marble shark paid for all his sins
as I emptied out his marble sacks and emptied out his bins.
I left with all his marbles rattling in my tin,
grateful that he’d never ask to play the game again!

Prompt words today are marble, shake, jocular and eventual.