Category Archives: Uncategorized

Diversity

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Diversity

The world’s based on diversity. If we were all the same,
we’d be the cause of our own problems. There’d be no one else to blame.
All of us would be prolific—equal in our fame.
We couldn’t tell our differences merely by our name.

We’d all be the same color and have the selfsame aims,
dance in the same manner and excel at the same games.
When we divulged our secrets, our friends would all be snoring,
for they’d all have the same ones which would make confession boring.

No beauty pageants, chess matches or battles of the bands.
No need to wander off to examine other lands.
If everyone were just the same, there’d be no competition.
Excellence would be extinct and no need for ambition.

There’d be no surprises, no extraordinary gifts.
No ups and downs in life. No depressions and no lifts.
Life would just be humdrum. How boring life would be
if nature hadn’t managed to create diversity!

Image by Jimmy Fermin on Unsplash. Used with permission. Word prompts today are prolific, divulge, count and diversity,When 

Goin’ Fishin’: Answers to The Friday Four

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For Rory’s Friday Four Questions

Do you think society could survive without governmental authority or structure?
No, but it might survive better with a better structure. I think the past four years have proven what happens when the wrong person is given authority and certainly pointed out the weaknesses in our governmental system in the U.S. It has been a shock to see just how bigoted and short-sighted approximately half of the American population is. I’d hate to see those people given free rein. We’ve already seen it, to a degree.
Do we really need all the technology we have?
Clearly, we don’t, but we’ve become dependent upon it and it has become a game of sorts to see just how far we can go. Game urinals in Japan where you control the game action with your urine stream are a perfect example.
Everyone has a passion that can absorb them for hours and that includes talking about it with others for hours if left unchecked – do you have such a passion and if so – what is it?
Art and writing. I get so engrossed that six hours can pass and seem like a half hour. I can’t imagine life without these compulsions.
What have you found yourself thinking a lot of late and that seemingly will not leave your brain alone?
Death and how/who will deal with all my stuff. You can have no idea. Books that I’ve written and done nothing with.. sitting in files. The utter horror that so many people supported Trump. and still do. 

Number 9 Blues

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Number 9 Blues

Those eyes,
that song,
a bird the color
of the moon
we met under.

The wind
a ribbon of sadness.
Cold hands,
broken heart—
all the hue
of a trumpet’s lonely staccato.

 

For dVerse Poets prompt: synesthesia.

Looking in, Looking out: Thursday Doors, Nov 5, 2020

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Click on photos to enlarge.

I snapped the first photo with my phone one late night/early morning, returning to my house from the studio. The second is my studio from my chair, the third is Morrie and Diego coming to tell me it is midnight and time to bome back up to the house. If they aren’t inside the studio, they are usually as close to the door outside as possible, and never fail to come to try to lure me up to the house at midnight. The fourth photo is looking out from my studio to the lake and the third is perhaps not quite legit. Does a doorway qualify as a door?

For Norm’s Thursday Doors.

Fools Rule Fools

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I could not stand to watch election results, afraid that  election results from four years ago would be repeated. I awakened at 5 a.m. to read a Facebook message from a friend fearing Trump had won. (Thanks, Gordon, for such a pleasant awakening message.) Then a message flashed in the upper right of my screen that Trump was protesting the election. So perhaps he hadn’t won, but the idea that it was close enough that he’d consider doing so broke my heart. Then I looked at the prompt words:


Fools Rule Fools

Utopia is broken, it’s promise growing faint.
Not a pretty picture for liberty to paint.
That it could even be this close signals something broken.
That all our pretty declarations have become a token.
Liberty and fairness? Land of opportunity?
What happened to “Give me your poor?” What happened to our unity?
“Opportunist” works to label one who seeks to rule us,
driven to seek office out of a lust to fool us.
People, take your blinders off. Your piper is a cruel one.
When it comes to ruling over fools, it takes a fool to rule one!

 

Word prompts today are paint, Utopia, promise..

Voting Our Destruction

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Voting Our Destruction

Some birds will still sing and flora abide
no matter what human might reside
in the colorless house with the POTUS inside.
But not so for those that have already died.
In the past year, seven more
have ceased to run or swim or roar.

The outcome of our land and sea,
each animal , insect and tree
depends on policies they make.
Will Earth survive or will we bake
on the spit of reckless choices,
protests made by unheard voices?

Will we find, at end of day
we’ve voted our kids’ lives away?
These are the species lost to us
in last year’s sparring, useless fuss:

                      • Sumatran Rhino. …
                      • Chinese paddlefish. …
                      • Yangtze giant softshell turtle. …
                      • Indian Cheetah. …
                      • Spix Macaw. …
                      • Catarina Pupfish. …
                      • Indochinese tiger

What new denizens will perish
from this Earth we say we cherish?
Yet we vote its life away
And we’re the ones who’ll have to pay.

 

Today the loss of species is estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times than that of the natural extinction rate. WWF reports that between 0.01% and 0.1% of all species go extinct every year. Considering the fact that there are around two million species on the planet, it means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year. And note, we are talking about species of which humans are one.

As per the 2018 report of World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), there’s a 60% decline in the population of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians in just 40 years. As per the IUCN Red List, more than 30,000 species are threatened with extinction, which means 27% of the nearly 1,12,000 species accessed so far are under grave danger.

In the past ten years, 33 plant species have become extinct. The species listed above in my poem all vanished in 2019. I was unable to find a list for 2020.

 

Prompt words today are flora, outcome, fated and reside.
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Photo Challenge #44, Black and White

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Click on photos to enlarge.

 

For Photo Challenge #44, November: Black and White

Podcast – The Case of the Missing Hit Song

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Forgottenman found an opinion column suggesting that this 50-minute podcast by /reply-all/ is one of the most entertaining EVER. I love it, too. Maybe you will as well.

A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet. PJ takes on the Super Tech Support case. #158 The Case of the Missing Hit

November 3, 2020

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November 3, 2020

We’re all on tenterhooks, watching and waiting.
We’re tired of tirades. We’re tired of debating.
All of our liberties turned inside out.
What was once done in peace has turned into a bout.
They storm and they threaten and set up false boxes—
the eagle of freedom brought down by vile foxes.

We can’t vouch for our system when so much goes wrong—
when our national anthem’s drowned out by a throng
of those who think that because they are white,
they are superior and have the right
to put down minorities and to change facts,
their white supremacy pardoning the acts

of looting and burning and intimidation.
These acts being staged with no trepidation
thanks to the POTUS who sits calmly by
and approves of it all from his perch in the sky.
We anticipate violence—fear it’s the ones
sowing disorder who have all the guns.

What is the solution? To arm everyone
and have a big shootout when voting is done?
Increasingly, I fear our cyber connection
has been both a bane and a lethal infection.
The villains know how to make use of it
to foment disaster and cause a big fit.

It reaches out hands to enter our homes.
It slashes and pierces and rabidly foams.
Hiding its poison in all of the cracks—
in viruses, malicious websites and hacks.
Turn out the villains, then work on the system
that welcomed them in and pampered and kissed ’em.

Our system of governance was made to be changed,
lest it be exploited by the deranged.
Enact campaign finance and firearms control,
then stem the electoral college’s role.
Time-worn practices need doing in,
for the robes of liberty have grown too thin.

Threadbare and tattered, she quakes at the blast
of self-serving politicians that tear at the past.

Prompt words today are tenterhooks, anticipate, storm and vouch. Image by Peggy Zinn on Unsplash. Used with permission.

Succulent Corolla

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For Cee’s FOTD