Category Archives: Poetry

Poems in many categories: Loss, NaPoWriMo

Overworked or Labor Shirked?

5 Replies


dsc00030-1

jdbphoto


Overworked or Labor Shirked?

It’s hard for me to find the middle
between hard labor and the fiddle.
Work? I either overdo it
or endeavor to eschew it.
Work all day and then all night,
being very erudite—
putting words down on the page,
imprisoned in my muse’s cage.

Perhaps I fear my distant past
when good work habits didn’t last
and days were spent in dreaming or
novels read behind closed door—
midnight radio a chance
for fantasies to spin romance.
Whole days stretched as though to catch
an errant dream of true love’s match.

I feared such days were sloth, and yet
perhaps they were just roads to get
to the place where I would tell
the stories that I knew so well
because I’d lived them first in dreams
or days just bursting at the seams
with doing nothing but living life—
its pleasures, problems, romance, strife.

First the doing at my leisure,
then the writing, and the seizure
of all the details of the past
that, once down on paper, are made to last.
Overworked or over-lived,
life first collected, then finely sieved.
Panned like gold to find the treasure—
leisure and work in even measure.

“Overworked” is the prompt word today.

Check List for a Budding Poet

10 Replies

img_1071

Check List for a Budding Poet

If you want to be prolific,
better that you be specific,
and when you choose to state each fact,
try to make each word exact.
Don’t use time-worn words or wilted.
Avoid pretentious words or stilted.

Never try to force a rhyme.
Do not fail to take the time
to make your lines scan smoothly for,
uneven meter is a bore.
Words written for effect are hollow,
but where heart is, the head will follow.

So write your poetry from the heart.
Put your horse before the cart
and let it pull you up the hill.
Let your words express their will—
you following blindly, just to see
what the next line wants to be.

Let words of different shapes and sizes
furnish pleasure and surprises.
Make your poems resemble zoos
of striped okapis and kangaroos.
Delight yourself and then your reader.
Follow words, then be their leader

by whipping them in line and order,
shaping them within your border.
It never is too late to change
an errant line that’s out of range,
but editing is not what you
initially should seek to do.

Words give hearts tongues to share their pleasure
and their pain in equal measure.
Essayists and authors strive
to make their writings come alive.
They show us where their minds have been,
but poets put the music in.

The prompt today was “specific.”

Float Trip

2 Replies

img_1906
Etching, p/a by Isidro Xilonzóchitl, jdbphoto 

Float Trip

When I feel life’s wear and tear
and wilt before rude gossip’s stare,
feeling vulnerable and bare,
as though I cannot get my share
of fresh, unviolated air,
I rise above the jarring glare
in search of space that is more rare,
willing to pay whatever the fare
to rise above the world’s nightmare
and hang suspended, without care.

There I soar, I risk, I dare.
It does not matter what I wear.
I don’t regret my thinning hair,
my widening waist or derriere.
I do not fear that speeding mare
that cuts the night to bring despair.
Rue not that life has been unfair.
Need neither mask nor nom de guerre,
for when things get too much to bear,
I float myself right out of there

to revel in my inner lair.

 

img_1903painting by Salvador, jdbphoto

The prompt word today was “float.”

 

You Have Become the Art You Lived For

20 Replies

You Have Become the Art You Lived For

The caustic smell of metal in your sweat
that by the end could fill the room,
as though the bronzes you had formed
had now invaded you
and filled you, blood and fiber.
Art can’t hurt you,
declared your favorite T-shirt,
colorful and now the final irony
of your life.

My dear,
art brought about your ending
as surely as it made your life,
yet you would have loved the bittersweet joke
as your kids and I
dressed you in that T-Shirt
for your final viewing.

You surround me even now—
brought two thousand miles
from Northern California
to middle Mexico.
The life you hoped to live, I live with those
who know you only through
your spiral lamp of stone and liana and paper,
Chi Wara standing feathered, bronze and tall,
the nude I posed for, on her side
with sticks for head and feet and cassowary feathers
hanging down from them,
the spirit sled of beaten copper, rawhide and willow—
all of them as exotic as you
never felt yourself to be.

They were beautiful and rare
and loved as you were.
How maddening
that you could not be
convinced of it.

That is why, when I think of you
now, so many years after,
the air grows pungent
with your memory.

(click on first photo to enlarge all)

For some reason, this is the only photo I have of the spiral lamp. I’ll replace it with a better one later.

 

 

To see more of Bob’s art and read another poem about him, go HERE.

 

The prompt today is “pungent.”

Blind Judgment

14 Replies

dsc08411“Macho” by Judy Dykstra-Brown, jdbphoto  

Blind Judgment

Wielding words like bludgeons, they stumble through our world,
supporting fools as their gods, confederate flags unfurled.
Motivated more by hate than any rational thought,
they’d have no more spices added to our melting pot.

Hooligans wielding bludgeons as simple as a vote
cannot see the truth of what their voting might denote.
A businessman with ethics determined by the dollar
seems to have convinced them he’s the friend of the blue collar.

Bankruptcy and divorces, rash words and rasher actions.
Tax-dodging obligations, like a child in his reactions.
His minions yielding bludgeons, be they cudgels, guns or mallets,
now have it in their power to trash the world with ballots.

So all these bleating sheep with their lovely little daughters
will feed them to misogyny, like lambs led to their slaughters.
What leads nations on in these times of mass delusion?
Tomfoolery and hate and fear can lead to mass confusion.

We’ve seen it down through history with Hitler and Pol Pot.
Attila and Idi Amin, Gaddafi and Sadat.
All the blind majority led onward by a dunce.
All the dark sides of the world coming out at once.

Please, fathers love your daughters and mothers love your sons.
Protect them from the hatred of bigots wielding guns.
From politicians inventing facts and changing history,
leaving devastation wherever they might be.

We’re taught that justice must be blind to shield in its detection
of prejudice, and yet that selfsame blindness in election
may lead to faulty judgment that leads to foolish acts.
We should not cast our ballots when blinded to the facts.

 

The prompt today was “bludgeon.”

Sand Castles

7 Replies

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAjdbphoto

Sand Castles

Under the sand are palaces. I’ve seen them in my dreams:
vast halls and empty chambers smoothly rounded at their seams.
Every wall is made of sand. Each ceiling, archway, floor––
as though carved by master craftsmen, digging at its core––
is so magnificent, you’d think they were the stuff of lore.
You may also see them, but you must provide the door.

Though the chambers are filled in, they’re there without a doubt.
You are the one creating them by what you will scoop out.
The beauty’s hidden in the sand, waiting in your sleep
for you to dig the castles out from where they’re buried deep.
All your day’s exhaustion your dream labor will abort,
for what you build in slumber is work of a different sort.

Sand brought to the surface is what you get to keep
of subterranean palaces dug out in your sleep.
As you build aboveground castles in the world that we all know,
you reveal the outward structure of the inner rooms below,
furnishing the magic that the world will see through you,
showing what’s inside of you by what you bring to view.

I’m going in for a medical procedure today, so no time to write a fresh poem. This is  a rewrite of a poem from a few years ago that fits today’s prompt of “underground.”

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/underground/

Waiting for the Rest of Her Life

8 Replies

img_7765photo and collage by jdb

Waiting for the Rest of Her Life

She has faith in the future that her life will fit.
She sits at home patiently, planning on it.
But as she sits waiting for the rest of her life,
the fear it won’t happen cuts like a knife.
As day after day goes by in a whirr,
she’s starting to realize it might not occur.

Her little white dog lies curled up beside her,
but stroking his coat won’t relieve what’s inside her.
She’s yearning for something­–she’s not quite sure what.
Inside her, the want of it roils in her gut,
then digs itself deeper into her soul.
It’s like playing a game where she can’t find the goal.

In every city, far up, looking down,
there are folks in tall buildings, surveying the town—
every alley and walkway for as far as they can
eyes staring out as they survey and pan
the small world below them that must have an answer
to this life that’s consuming them like a slow cancer.

I want to tell them that love can’t find you.
You must lean yourself over and pick up a shoe.
Put it on, then the other one. Walk out the door.
Waiting’s not what life was intended for.
We were pushed into life at the time of our birth,
and life goes on pushing all over the earth.

So all of you people with all of your faces
behind all these windows in all of these places,
Give up your pining and wishing and hoping.
No happiness lies in all of this coping.
Go find your soulmate, no matter the weather,
and then you can spend your life waiting together.

 

 

The prompt word today was “waiting.”

 

 

Morning Protein

8 Replies

img_7374

Morning Protein

Each morning when I waken, I take a little pill;
but though it is to boost my health, today it made me ill.
Before I went to slumber, I poured a glass of Coke
so it would be there in the night if I began to choke.
I know it isn’t usual, but it works for me.
Somehow it works to clear my throat and leaves the passage free.

So when I took my pill this morning, feeling sort of hazy,
I didn’t go for water, but instead I was just lazy.
I lifted up the Coke cup, filled almost to the brim,
and only had a little sip before up to the rim
something solid floated that shouldn’t have been there.
I felt something that tickled––like very coarse stiff hair.

Later, I was glad I hadn’t taken bigger sips,
for as it was, just part of it made it past my lips.
I hurried to the bathroom and spit and spit and spit,
then emptied out the cup and didn’t look at it
as a big dead cockroach went swirling down the drain.
Will I drink without looking? No. Never again.

The prompt this morning was “Clumsy.”

Promises

13 Replies

img_3122

Promises

When we first made our promises, our hearts were young and gay,
and all the things we had in life we thought we would parlay
from good fortune freely given for which we’d never pay.

But though the sun that lulls us with its warming ray
does not always scorch the earth, certainly, it may,
and all the tender shoots of spring by autumn turn to hay.

And so it is with promises, no matter what you say.
What I’ve noticed about promises is that they melt away,
for those who live by promising sometimes have feet of clay.

Promises lightly given sometimes start to weigh
upon the minds of those who have held their fears at bay.
Such things may cause the truest heart later to turn fey.

The lives we take for granted, sure we’ll always be okay,
in the end life complicates by answering with “Nay.”
So what you want to share with me, please share by end of day.

The prompt word today was “Promises.”

Flat

9 Replies

img_6880

Flat

Like a phony love letter not influenced by Cupid,
flattery will get you somewhere only with the stupid.

For if praise is unwarranted, it leaves us feeling flat.
When so falsely offered, it falls down with a splat.

While flattery may be offered by those without a clue,
praise and adulation are not flattery if they’re true.

Praise is a beloved pet, but flattery’s a zoo.
While you’re  curious to view it, you don’t take it home with you.

 

The prompt word today is “Flattery.”