In a restauraunt, at the beach,
our camera’s always within reach.
Sky or water, heads or tails,
not a single photo fails
to tell a story, be it true
or some untruth once told to you.
I care not if it’s false or true
–what its inhabitants might do.
Just pick a picture, then tell me
whatever story you may see.
Thanks, Mom, for all of those early rhyming sessions
Compulsion to Rhyme II
By now you’ve read my oeuvre once or twice before.
It’s bulging out of file cases, stacked upon the floor.
It’s quickly filling up my blog and straying to the media.
Soon I fear I must compose my own encyclopedia.
It started out a habit but soon became compulsion.
My housecleaner surveys my poems with undisguised revulsion.
Spiders live within the files, cats use them for their beds,
so they serve grander purposes than cluttering up heads.
Perhaps someone could stop me with a cudgel or a gun,
but lacking that, I fear that when my final poem is done,
my heirs will have to market my oeuvre by the ton.
For Blast from the BlogII. A ryhme from Aug 29 in 2018.
A Different Perspective
Still standing close,
each on our own side of this terrible rending,
how can we see things so differently?
This little flap of skin
you keep pulling open
wants to close.
This is how cancers start—
this worrying and worrying of an old injury.
My darling. Leave it alone
and let us heal.
This is only a biopsy
of our changed love affair.
If it is cut out of us,
it will be by your decision;
and no number of late-night arguments
will ever change that fact.
What you need to remember
the next morning,
you will remember.
If it were up to me,
we would still be friends,
but if you need an enemy
to console you in your actions,
I guess I must be that too.
I always was a figment
of your imagination.
Believe that
if it makes this easier for you.
For Fibbing Friday his week, the assignment is:
1. What is a puggle: A tiny fart released by accident when one giggles.
2. What is an hibiscus? A short period of hibernation.
3. What is a concertina? The drapery around a jail cell.
4. What is a dipstick? The sound a potato chip makes coming out of the chip dip.
5. What would you use a feeler gauge for? To measure your feeler, of course. Duh!
6. What is a vernier caliper? The verniest caliper of all.
7. Where would you use a lopper? About three minutes in to what promises to be a very long and boring story.
8. What is meant by ‘wabbit’? A wabbit is a wascally Lagomorph.
9. What is a ratoon? The mixed-blood progeny of a racoon and a rat.
10. What is meant by borborygm? An excessively lengthly and boring story.
Fact or Fiction?
wars, tsunamis
murdered mommies
global warming
cancers forming
mad religions and heretics
engineering our genetics
drug cartels
emptying wells
mounting debt
nuclear threat
I hate to say it
but every day it
is getting worse
this global curse
and human capers
in all the papers
so all in all
it’s an easy call
I find less friction
in reading fiction!
For Fact or Fiction?
Off for a walk with our new roomie, Julie, who is living with us for a few months while she writes her new book. For Thursday Doors.
Dining Out
When I’m in a public place
talking to friends, face-to-face,
and my secrets I choose to tell
to those I’ve known both long and well;
when I swear them to secrecy,
I need to also remind me
that of two actions I have the choice.
Watch what I say or lower my voice.
What nearby tables say and do,
I’m sometimes silent witness to.
The realization I may lack
is that perhaps they’re listening back!
Unlikely Pairing
One ungainly orphan elephant, wandering and uncertain
of where his journey’s leading him, comes upon a curtain
of mist that rises from the plain, shimmering, evanescent.
The stars now muted overhead, the moon a fuzzy crescent.
He splits the curtain, comes upon a lone and lost impala
split off from the herd during some wild stampeding gala.
They form a duo and plod on, each looking for a herd.
Such an unlikely couple. Impossibly absurd.
And yet they struck a certain chord, each one with the other.
She was the sister that he lacked, and he her missing brother.
One thing led to another. She fit him like a glove,
and before they knew it, the two were fast in love.
When the baby came, it looked a bit like a nyala,
a bit like a rhinoceros––an elephantiala!!
Burning your Journals
Who knew fidelity’s even stance
could be mitigated by circumstance?
That a subtle smile, perchance,
exchanged between you at her advance
would wind up in a swift romance
that flourished in that small expanse
between us and her winsome glance.
Who knew that you would go freelance
when love became our ritual dance?
And that I, still in loving’s trance,
would only learn it later, by chance.
Reading your words, caught twice askance.
First by your death, then grief enhanced
as I suffered loss anew
with this further death of you.
Cracking Open the Content Time Capsule
Dawning
Around me, a cacophony
of morning sounds awaken me,
those first faint birdcalls subtle draws
to other chirpings, tweets and caws.
Airbrakes on a far-off road
likewise jar and likewise goad
other aspects of the choir to stir:
tapping of woodpecker and whirr
of the wings of hummingbird.
Then nature’s single most absurd
sound—the donkey’s seesaw bray—
that final harbinger of day.
Light invades the cushy dark
where my dreams had hoped to park
for another hour or so,
but instead, they quickly go
back to where dreams wait for us.
The labored gear shift of a bus
grinds me into consciousness
and a new day’s constant fuss.
In time, this route will not be taken—
this constant cycle to awaken
will be softened as we go
unresisting to the undertow
of that silence more eternal,
that soft rest of the nocturnal
sensual in its quietness.
Is it more or is it less,
this agony of losing breath,
this stunning quietness of death?
Or when the sounds of living cease,
will we welcome the release
from this busy, noisy world
into which nature has hurled
us squawking, protesting and grieving
for the quiet nest we’re leaving?
Though we’ve increased in height and girth,
every morning’s a new birth
as creak of door and whisk of broom
rip us from the night’s calm womb.
Half grudgingly, we meet our fate,
arising to the ultimate
challenge to our energy:
the new day’s challenge just “to be.”
