Couldn’t stop m’self!!!!
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Red Sky
Small roof dweller
For Terri’s Sunday Stills Summer in Pink prompt.
In the Pink
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“The Fool Doth Think He Is Wise”
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
–Wm. Shakespeare
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
—Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man
“The Dunning–Kruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating
that people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability.”
–(Wikipedia)
“The Fool Doth Think He Is Wise”
Although his conclusion was toothsome and salty,
it was my colleague’s premise I found to be faulty.
His logic? Ramshackle, for facts in his keeping
would make a logician run, screaming and leaping,
out of the room and over the hill,
when of this insanity, he’d had his fill.
Light intellect teamed up with heavy endeavor,
expressed by a soul neither heartful nor clever
is a dangerous pairing in this Internet world,
where such like-minded fools, their illogic unfurled,
can find a wide audience, hardly deserved,
that would leave Einstein weeping and Hawking unnerved.
Prompt words are colleague, ramshackle, leaping, premise and heavy.
The Well-Lit Way
Snow White Plumbago: FOTD June 12, 2021
I have a huge hedge of this flower on the street side of my wall, but I have no idea what it is.
Janet Waters asked to see the leaves so here they are. And—she identified the flower as Plumbago. Thanks, Janet!!! You can see here blog HERE.
For Cee’s FOTD
He Said, She Said
He Said, She Said
When she questioned his fidelity, he said she was a loser,
though he was the real lowlife—a bully and a bruiser.
“We’re not a pair,” he snapped at her. “I never took an oath
that I would be true to you, in fact, I’m rather loath
to say that when I married you, it wasn’t a mistake.
The only thing I liked about it was the wedding cake!
I’d had a few too many the day that we were hitched
and ever since we had the kids, you have bitched and bitched.
You like to snap my head off If I partake with the boys
and come home after midnight. If I make the slightest noise
and if I wake the kids up, well, so what? They’re my kids, too.
Perhaps they’d like to spend some time with me instead of you.
So what if it is 3 a.m.? Tomorrow we’ll sleep in.
You’d think that playing with your kids past midnight is a sin!!!!
The way to keep your man is to practice your felicity.
Instead of gripes, I’d like to see some wifely elasticity.
I always was a party guy. I always was a rover.
If you expect much more of me, my time with you is over.”
To Which She Answered:
The kids are at my mother’s, your packed bag in the garage.
Almost from the beginning, our marriage was a mirage.
I’ve called the man to change the locks. I’ve closed our bank account.
There’s money in your suitcase—a very small amount.
My father bought our house and my salary, at best,
is what was in the bank account. You drank up all the rest.
So what if it is 3 a.m.? You’re used to nighttime games.
Check your little black book. It’s sure to yield some names.
If you’ve had too much to drink, it’s best you don’t drive far,
but I’m sure that you’ll be comfy sleeping in the car.
I’ve decided to withdraw from marital complicity,
and that will bring you what you want. In short, your wife’s felicity!!
Prompts today are “not a pair,” snap, partake, felicity and loser. Photo by Elvis Bekmanis on Unsplash, used with permission.
Final Curtain
Final Curtain
Behind a tangle of bushes and impenetrable wood,
paint peeling from its walls in strips, the ancient mansion stood.
A blemish on our neighborhood, the property condemned.
By its neighbors’ pristine hedges, its boundaries were hemmed
like burnsides on each side of an unruly mustache.
And no amount of pressure and no amount of cash
could persuade the one who lived there—a widow old and frail
to repair her ravaged property or put it up for sale.
And though neighbors voiced their protests, she challenged one and all
simply by remaining behind her crumbling wall.
At night, thin wispy music from her gramophone
leaked out through the bushes as she danced on all alone
over creaking floorboards, reliving bygone days
and a life once vivid now diminished to a haze.
Reenacting dramas of a life gone by too fast,
she played the heroine while other roles all went uncast.
Prompt words today are challenge, blemish, burnsides, tangle and property. Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash, used with permission.
Azalea: FOTD June 10, 2021
I took this photo across the street in front of my neighbors’ house. I think it is an azalea, but if you know differently, feel welcome to expose my ignorance.
Beach Rendezvous
Beach Rendezvous
Your andante whistle matches your advance—measured and slow, as though you know where you are going, but are in no hurry to get there. You’ve grown weird and amphibious—spending equal time in water and on land, a surfboard your new mount, your cowboy hat metamorphosed into a billed cap worn backwards.
You have achieved some notoriety due to that prowess in water that you never found on dry land. You, who crashed cars into traffic cones and bicycles into fences, weave effortlessly from wave to wave, then ride their crests. You nosh on kale and granola, leaving McDonald’s in the past. Who would ever guess that this cowboy farmer would start surfing from scratch at the age of thirty, thereby achieving a fame he’d never earned in the rodeo?
You scratch your forehead, freeing a long blond lock from its imprisonment, pull off your cap and take a playful swap at my shoulder as we draw close enough to share a hug, a kiss. Classmates our whole lives from elementary school through college, we have somehow slipped into different generations—you the proverbial beach boy surfer, me the middle-aged mommy herding kids away from sand crabs and beached stingrays, you gliding between them on water, already a fixture in this cool beach town–your whole life composed of what for me is an occasional weekend visit lugging picnic basket, beach towels, blanket, umbrella and three children aged four to ten.
“Daddy!” the kids scream, running toward us streaming seawater from their heels. One by one, you grab them under their arms, spinning them in wild circles, then, with the smallest one on your shoulders and grasping the hands of the others on either side, you make off for the water to reacquaint them with their aquatic side. The picture I took that day shows four kids playing in the water. I had given birth to three of them. You gave birth to the fourth.
Prompt words today are andante,amphibious, scratch, achieving, nosh and weird.
Random Orders
Random Orders
When our builder said that “It’s terribly good“
as he showed us the shipment of rainforest wood,
I, for one, uttered a silent scream,
for how could I okay this endangered beam?
In like manner, when he presented the door
of yew, it elicited a quiet roar.
So instead, he then showed us a genuine fake—
some laminate made for ecology’s sake
out of plastic and sawdust fused by black light.
Okay, I’m confused. Is night day and day night?
When we asked him for details and asked him to give
us a price for this place we were hoping to live,
he gave us one total, then he gave us a few.
An exact estimate seemed the best he could do.
As if, in his string of incessant banality,
all he could offer was ultimate reality.
my husband and I are both loyal opponents
of phrases with contradictory components.
So his exact estimate clearly confused.
It was plain that the language was being abused.
When our sawyer tried selling us a smaller half
of a board for our wall shelf, I gave a small laugh.
with passive aggression, I played the wise fool.
Was this our only choice? For this was not cool.
At first just amused, in the end we were sad,
for these oxymorons were driving us mad.
Surely these word games were only a fad.
Kids in cliques may mean good when they say it is bad,
but we were adults here and now on the brink
of retiring somewhere to have a stiff drink.
A close distance away was a favorite bar
with a mean martini served in a jar.
We gave random orders for olives and gin,
telling the barkeep what shape we were in.
Then, heads swimming with opposites, we didn’t scrimp.
We told the waiter to bring jumbo shrimp!
Word prompts today are sawyer, clique, oxymoron, fad and give. In case it wasn’t obvious, I took the prompt word “oxymoron” to excess. All of the highlighted words are oxymorons (self-contradictory phrases.)
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 