Parasite
Mankind has been no bargain. They’ve scorched the living earth,
determined to exploit it to improve their worth.
Bargaining for diamonds, drilling for fossil fuels—
with each new excavation, proving they are fools.
They release noxious gases into the atmosphere,
and with each new admonition, shift to a higher gear.
Who will console our children as they forge ahead
following our example after we are dead?
We leave them with a dying world, and who is to blame?
First, off, those politicians who see it as a game
to increase their power in spite of consequences,
building up their war toys, strengthening defenses.
Extending greedy fingers, needing ever more.
Selling off our future, profiting from war.
While the wise men warn us, who in power listens?
Too busy filling pockets with everything that glistens.
Prompt words today are: fossil, scorch, gas, console, example and bargain.
Birth of a Couch Potato
The crush of humanity, swell of the crowd,
demands a new edict. No pushing allowed.
Thus turning the scene a tad melancholy,
whereas in the past it had been pretty jolly.
The policy depended, primarily, on shaming
certain well-known revelers I won’t be naming,
by branding them careless , ill-mannered and rude
and other crass labels that I won’t include.
Suffice it to say that this official labeling
contributed much to their social disabling.
Now they sit home getting flaccid and flabby,
watching old episodes of Downton Abbey.
.
Prompts for today are crush, swell, shaming, flabby, policy and melancholy .
Image by Eric Mclean on Unsplash
I received this email today. If meant as a joke, not the least bit funny. If not a joke, scary as Hell: 
I received this in an email. How can it even be legal to put such a threatening message on the Internet? SICK SICK SICK!!!!!
![]](https://i0.wp.com/judydykstrabrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_7949.jpg?w=204&h=153&ssl=1 "IMG_7949")
Fact to Fiction: The Storyteller
If I must explain the robbery of my peace of mind,
I’ll plaster on a smile and see if I can find
languor of mind to do so in a manner so compelling
that you’ll never feel the horror I experience in its telling.
The unity we come to as I come to a conclusion
is a little fantasy created by the fusion
of truth and storytelling, for I never fail
to weave a pretty story out of a horrid tale.
Prompt words today are explain, robbery, unity, conclusion languor and plaster.
Future Shock
On our way to maturation, when we’re adult-bound,
childhood’s denizens are most likely to astound.
Expressing new insights, they make statements bound to shock
that upon close scrutiny, their elders choose to mock.
Patterns of behavior that they, too, exhibited,
glorying in actions their elders once prohibited.
Thus does every generation choose to shock the last
as their predecessors fade into the past.
Time is a marsh that buries memories of old
as each new wave of humans discovers acts more bold.
Prompt words today are patterns, insight, scrutiny, marsh, childhood. Images by Tamara Bellis and Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash.
