Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Little Night Music

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maeghan-smulders-pIY5yM0bmMQ-unsplashPhoto by Maeghan Smulders on Unsplash. Used with permission

A Little Night Music

It may seem eccentric to sing in your sleep,
but when I’m in slumber so sound and so deep,
sometimes my voice just wants to get out
in some type of utterance—whisper or shout.
And then if I must, would it be such a pity
to let out my voice in a full-throated ditty?
Folks walk in their sleep, so why can’t they sing?
Why would you consider it such a strange thing?
Dreams can’t be censored, directed or herded.
There are times when  a melody must be asserted.
So if you should hear my somnambulant song,
please stifle complaints and just hum along!!

Prompt words today are sleep, rare, eccentric and sing.

Window on the World

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For the Monday Windows Challenge.

Ducks in a Row: FOTD, Dec 10, 2019

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I love these little buds that look like a bunch of ducks or a gaggle of geese in a row.

For Cee’s FOTD

Monument

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Monument

A cow is screaming across the arroyo. Fireworks explode in honor of whatever saint’s day is being celebrated this week, drowning out her loud shrieking bellows. It is twelve hours later that someone finds the cow, her horns caught in the wire fence. Too late to save her, they do the kind thing and a single shot rings out. When her owner leaves her for the buzzards, a stench settles over the neighborhood, and we pay a man to cover her in quicklime. It is months later that someone ventures up to find a perfect effigy of the cow—jaws open in her last cries of agony. In mistaking concrete for quicklime, the man we paid to do away with her has instead constructed her monument. Immortalized on that mountain where few others will ever see her, I often see her in my dreams.

For dVerse Poets, we were to write a story of 144 words or less that made use of the line about the screaming cow above. You can read the stories others wrote on the topic by hitting the dVerse link above. This one is exactly 144 words. True story, by the way.

Thunbergia with Spike

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For Cee’s FOTD

Big Hair and Histamines

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Big Hair and Histamines

“These Kleenex are too flagrant, they always make me sneeze,” she said as she added yet another wadded puff to the pile in the trash can beside her bed. “Why in the world would they add perfume to something people with allergies blow their noses into?”

“Yes, it’s a fragrant abuse of medical logic,” I said, but she didn’t get the joke. She was too miserable and so I just let her malapropism slide by as I had so many times in our long friendship.

The air in this season of new growth was full of pollen. We indulged our roommate by keeping the windows of our college quad closed at all times and we had long ago relegated all our perfume to bottom drawers or trash cans. In those long-ago days of “big hair” when there was no such thing as unscented anything, we took the calculated risk of using hair spray, but only by climbing out onto the fire escape, pulling the window shut behind us and waiting a good five minutes before entering the room again. And this only if our allergy-prone friend was not in the room.

Occasionally, she caught a whiff of us as we passed in the game room or dining room, but she didn’t mention it. We knew that look, though. Only vanity won out over our need not to irritate the nasal fibers of our good friend. No one would miss our perfume, but in terms of hair, no girl dared to defy the norm. Bubbly, big, smooth and helmet-solid—that was the hair-fashion decree of the sixties.

Prompt words today are flagrant, indulged, quad, calculate and air.

Shaving Brush Bloom: FOTD, Dec 8, 2019

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I have driven under the huge tree that sits in front of Pasiano’s house thousands of times over the past 18 years and only today did I notice that it is a shaving brush tree! One of my favorite blooms and the only one I’d seen before was in La Ribera in Baja California. I stopped the car, backed up and got out to take a few shots. Amazing what we can overlook so close to home.

Click on photo to enlarge.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day prompt.

Wardrobe Change

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Image by Ivan Dodig on Unsplash. Used with permission

Wardrobe Change

Her sequined dress, once fabulous, has lost its shape and glitter.
It lies beneath her window, reduced to roadside litter.
She might have been more charitable—donating the gown.
They could have earned a pretty penny for a dress of such renown.
But she needs its story ended. She could not bear to face
another woman’s body and another woman’s face
pictured in the tabloids in that gown made just for her.
Its memories running through her mind, quickly, in a blur.

Trips down long red carpets, the flashbulbs and the fuss.
Minding how she sat so its gathers would not muss.
How its beauty cut into the soft mounds of her flesh.
The sharp knives of its edges. The fine silk of its mesh.
The fusing of those opposites—the pleasure and the pain.
His gentle kiss, but how, at last, he left her once again.
The lovely words once spoken that turned out to be just script.
The dress tugged off in anger. The dress she’d pulled and ripped

to be free of all it brought to mind—the glamour and the pain.
Best it be diminished by harsh sun and rain.
She flung it out the window, not caring where it rested.
Rid of it, would painful memories be bested?
Covered up by road dust, bogged down by stormy weather,
sequins floated gutters, each weightless as a feather.
Threads loosened and seams parted as the garment ceased to be—
its combined pains and pleasures consigned to memory.

Prompt words today are charitable, litter, fabulous and dress.

Floral Fan: FOTD Dec 7, 2019

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IMG_4344 2Loved the fan shape of this little cluster of kalanchoes.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.

Opening Night at the Theater with a Famous Screen Legend’s Guest Appearance

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photo by Jordhan Madec on Unsplash. Used with permission

Opening Night at the Theater
with a Famous Screen Legend’s Guest Appearance

There’s an air of raw excitement in the theater tonight.
The ingenues are nervous and the grand dame wants to fight.
Her makeup isn’t done right and her hairdo is a fright.
The set is way too yellow and the stage lights are too bright!

She regales them with stories of when she was at her height.
They wonder just how many great successes she will cite.
It is a frosty evening, yet they brave the cold wind’s bite 
to stand out in the alley to escape the much worse plight

of the thirtieth retelling of the star’s first opening night.
The male lead finally gets here, but, alas, high as a kite.
The orchestra begins their opus, hoping to incite
the audience to wild applause as they get their first sight

of the famous lady, surrounded by pink light
that obscures those telltale wrinkles and a costume that’s too tight.
The ingenues are all in place, ready for the fight,
waiting for the star to speak, then exit to the right.

Then all their minor lines they are ready to recite.
It will be a war of words, and they’re ready to fight.
This era, it will be their turn the audience to excite.
Will they outshine the brightest star? Yes, perhaps they might!

Prompt words today are excitement, stage, frosty, regale and yellow.