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Highchair Fashionista

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Frock

Enlarge all photos by clicking on any one.

 

Highchair Fashionista

Her mania for haute couture
came a little premature
when she first crawled across the floor,
wanting to see Grandma’s Dior.
When she took her first steps and fell,
it was reaching for Auntie’s Chanel.
The words she learned at Mama’s knee
were Calvin Klein and Givenchy.

Her alphabet from A to V
(from Armani up to Versace)
she learned in closets of her kin
dreaming of how she’d look in
Louis Vitton, Laurent, Bill Blass.
She’d be the best-dressed in her class
of other girls in cut-off jeans
and dresses made by mere machines.

Thus are fashionistas made.
As other children sell lemonade
or waste their days in hide-and-seek,
they are fingering La Fabrique
and looking at the fold and drape
of a model’s evening cape.
To each their own, we’re given to say,
and yet I’m prone to saying “Nay,
childhood might be better spent
in pastimes of another bent.”

I’d hope that kids from zero to twelve
might be more encouraged to delve
into comics or games or nature
with no stylish nomenclature.
Let kids be freakish, free and nerdy.
Let their clothes get torn and dirty.
Time enough for fashion cults
later, when they’re grown adults.

 

The prompt today was premature.

Flower’s End (Papaya) Flower of the Day, May 18, 2018

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I’ve been resisting posting this photo, which actually isn’t a flower, but the end result of a flower: green papayas and the cut off stems. Still waiting for them to ripen and end up on my breakfast table.

For: Cee’s flower prompt

Green Brownies

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Green Brownies

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(This poem evolved from notes that I scribbled into the margin
of our Mexican Train score sheet while visiting my friend Gloria.)

Green Brownies

The brownie that she serves me
crumbles when I try to break it in half.
Her sense of humor allows it and so I tease her.
“Gloria, this looks like the kind of food
my grandmother tried to pawn off on us—
weeks old and crusty from the refrigerator.”

“Those chocolate chips were like that when I bought them!”
she insists, even before I question their green tinge.
I think that this is even worse than the alternative,
and say so and we both laugh as she eats her brownie
and I reduce mine to dust. Not a hard task, as it turns out.

She’s had a bad infection for a week or more.
“I’m not contagious,” she insists each time she coughs
a long low rasping rumble that threatens to avalanche.
“Now stop!” she tells the sounds that explode
without permission from her chest.

“Perhaps,” I say, “These brownies are a godsend
and that’s penicillin growing on the chocolate chips.”
Then her deep coughs transform into
gasps of laughter that echo mine.

The young man there to rake the garden
looks up at us and shakes his head
at two old ladies drinking rum and
eating something chocolate,
and it occurs to me that perhaps
what the world sees as senility
is simply evolution
out of adulthood
to a higher
stage.

 

 

Are you feeling a sense of deja vu? This is a reblog of a piece I wrote four years ago. The WordPress prompt word today was infect.

Bougainvillea Still Life: Flower of the Day, May 17, 2018

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Pasiano has no reverence for art when it comes to yard cleanup. 

 

For Cee’s flower prompt.

Loud Music in the Rainy Season

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Click on any photo to enlarge all.


Loud Music in the Rainy Season

Up above me, such a din!
I feel my patience growing thin.
Cross fingers that they do not fall
as workmen scamper over all,
balancing on domes and peaks,
replacing roof tiles, sealing leaks.

They’re taking the old surface off
all my domes and drainage trough,
putting membrane down and goo
that will not let the water through
in June when rains beat hard and steady,
although, alas, they’ve come already!

The dogs are sent into a tizzy.
Looking up, I just get dizzy.
In this world that I love so,
down here in lovely Mexico,
now the grinder joins the din.
In a noise Olympics, it would win!

My thoughts all center on escaping
this chipping, drilling, pounding, scraping.
How I’d like to leave this all
for relative quiet at the mall!
But, alas, I must remain
a martyr to construction pain.

Ear plugs having no effect,
before my sanity is wrecked,
I turn up music to a SHOUT
to let Bob Dylan drown them out.
Now Caitlin Cary croons and sings
that she is “Sorry” and other things.

Eliza Gilkyson’s rough croon
is over oh too soon, too soon.
The silence that her true love speaks
replaced now by the sander’s shrieks,
I turn the iPod on again,
full force, to drown out all the din.

I’ve no sympathy for the neighbors’ plight.
Their damn dog kept me up all night,
and if my eardrums are to be shot
I would rather that it’s not
by machines like those above,
but rather by a sound I love.

The prompt word today is “thin.”

Royal Poinciana: Flower of the Day, May 15, 2018

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For Cee’s Flower Prompt.

SYW May 14, 2018

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Every so often, nosy Cee wants to know what we’ve been up to.  I often forget to play, but here are my answers for this week along with some extra info:

Complete this sentence: This sandwich could really use some …teeth in it.

What is your least favorite candy? Licorice

What sign are you? Do you believe in astrology? Cancer. I have the same attitude toward astrology as I do toward religion. I would like to believe in it and at times behave as though I do but I am skeptical. I would still always read my horoscope if I subscribed to a paper, as I occasionally pray when in an extremely harrowing situation. I am a great believer in synchronicity and the interconnectedness of the universe. Perhaps they are all one and the same thing.

What did you appreciate or what made you smile this past week?  So, my week has been a time of dinner out with friends complete with Mexican dancers, Mexican train, film nights at my house, swims in the pool between rainstorms, trees blooming all over town, smashed fingers, cut fingers, burned fingers, roof repairs, hurricane-strength winds, trees down, electrical outages, picking up after hurricane-strength winds, rainfall, towels and bowls under leaks, cats in every corner of the house escaping the rain, broken fingernails and removing the domed clear skylight (which is cracked in two places and leaking during rainstorms) in the middle of my 18 foot high dome. After they removed the frosted skylight, the sky shone bright blue through the opening and clouds drifted by. All too soon, however, they’d covered it with a clear piece of plastic and tarps which plunged the room into a gloomy darkness. It will be this way until they return with a new domed skylight custom-crafted to fit exactly as the old one did.

I had always known how responsible that skylight was for the light in the room, but I was surprised at the degree to which it served as a sun for my world.  In spite of  glass walls on 1 ½ sides, the otherwise cheerful room developed shadows and an all-over sort of gloominess that had me turning on every light available. Still, I feel the gloom of my shadowed world as I type this.  Here are a few photos to illustrate:

 

 

 

Terry and John at Viva Mexico
Drip management
At midnight, the lightning made it look like daylight
The skylight before
After the skylight is covered. Dark in daylight!
Royal poinciana in bloom in front garden
Cat ball
Another day, another finger injury
Making the most of those costumes.
I keep this one Oaxacan rug mainly because the kitties love to tunnel under it.
I think she’s coming!
Grandma’s kerosene lantern still gets regular usage in Mexico during power outages.
Flip side of the stitched finger slammed in the door.
The waiting faithful

Click on any photo to enlarge all, read captions and see slide series.

One question, though.  Why do I keep hurting my fingers????

 

For: https://ceenphotography.com/2018/05/14/share-your-world-may-14-2018/

Cornhusk Flowers: Flower of the Day, May 13, 2018

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Still struggling to try to get all the flower photos from my phone to my computer. In the meantime, here are some  flowers made from cornhusks by the ladies on the other side of the lake. I love them!

See Cee’s raindropped iris HERE.

Skewed Liberty (This Country for Sale)

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Skewed Liberty

Everything is tilted. Slightly unaligned.
The constitution set askew. Liberty maligned.
Some of the well-heeled citizens think that this is fine.
They cannot see that everything is slightly out of line.
All the pretty Philistines queue up at their tees
while their flunky lawyers determine what to seize.
Contracts with the Russians. Schemes to sell off national land.
Cronies helping cronies. Off-shore drilling by demand.

Rivers being sullied and oceans compromised
while insuring rights to bear arms are exercised.
Certain pious preachers line up behind the svelte,
proclaiming to the masses that they know what Jesus felt.
Indeed, the smallest sparrow  no longer matters much
so long as all the mighty increase their greedy clutch––
all the moneychangers, corrupt to the core,
filling all their pockets with the money of the poor.

Surely it is clear that at ruling they’re inept,
and if he was watching, surely Jesus wept
as all the pearls of liberty were cast before the swine
with each self-serving libertine declaring  what is “mine.”
What is true no longer matters. What “they” say is now what now counts.
They say it’s holy scripture as they settle their accounts.
People, take off your blinders. Consider what is real.
One nation, under God, was not set up for them to steal!

The WordPress prompt today was skewed.

Thursday Doors, May 10, 2018

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Click on photos to enlarge.

Opening Doors

We click them open, pull them shut.
We shine their locks and dust them, but
when we leave a house to roam,
a turned key doesn’t make it home.
Ownership is not the thing
that crowns you as your house’s king.
If you want your house to fit,
you need to put some life in it.

For Thursday Doors prompt.

To view other doors or add your own door photo, go HERE.