The Banker, the Doctor, the Rabbi, the Priest

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PhPhoto by Ryan O’Niel on Unsplash. Used with permission

The Banker, the Doctor, the Rabbi, the Priest

The banker, the doctor, the rabbi, the priest
used to jam back back in high school and never ceased.
They’ve been meeting on Saturday nights all their lives
leaving their girlfriends and bishops and wives
to drink beer and rap and have deep discussion
about riffs and choruses, notes and percussion.
The priest is the drummer. He wields a wild stick.
The rabbi’s a string guy. The cello’s his schtick.
The banker plays sax and the doctor’s on keys,
but they’re all pretty good at  shooting the breeze.

It’s as hot as a sauna and still they play on.
All through the night and into the dawn.
the priest squeegees his glasses off with his left thumb
while his right is engaged in beating the drum.
He’s a stickler for rhythm, enthralled with the beat.
He stirs a small zephyr while stomping his feet.
When they’ll stop playing is anyone’s guess.
It’s obvious they overlook my duress.
They’ve had a good jam. A most excellent session,
but the priest better scoot or he’ll miss my confession!

Prompts for today are stickler, squeegee, zephyr, enthrall and guess.

sees freeze geeze he’s jees knees please sneeze queeze squeeze tease wheeze

Geranium: FOTD, Apr 26, 2020

5 Replies

 

 

This little geranium has certainly seen better days but there is something about its shape that I find very appealing.

 

For Cee’s FOTD

Daydream of an Expat in Mexico

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These photos tell the story as well. Click on the first and then on the arrows to enlarge.

 

Daydream of an Expat in Mexico

The cupped palms of Mexico
fold around me.
It is one of the warm months,
with flowers popping out of their coats
like brightly-clad party guests.

Candy apple red plumeria
somehow avoids clashing
with the purple bougainvillea
that has encroached upon its borders,
and one silly Gerber daisy bows her head
near the steps between the dining room and patio.

My life is here around me.
A dining room table echoes the ghosts
of former Thanksgiving guests.
Solar Xmas lights strung around the kitchen walls near the ceiling
decide to turn on in the day instead of night.
A lizard minus half his tail
disappears into the jungle of ferns next to the kitchen door.
The lazy cats curl in apostrophes,
dreaming of catching the whole lizard next time.

Painted vines that will never curl up and die
twine around doors and entryways.
Teo Mixtli Xicualli, brave lake goddess,
 La Llarona
in the nicho over the garage,
and Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent
who lies stretched out over my bedroom sliders—
are my guardians.

On the street, the shredded bag and scattered garbage the dogs got to before the garbagemen— something to attend to today in this time of cancelled responsibilities.
It is a conspiracy, perhaps,
to draw me from my door,
necessitating street clothes
and the full requirement of undergarments.
We have gone wild in this time of confinement,
misplacing blow dryers and mascara wands,
letting body parts fall to their natural places
under clothes looser and more diaphanous than before.

Last night’s dream was of the camaraderie of teenage slumber parties,
bodies pressed close like puppies
in sleeping bags on the backyard grass
or the half-finished basement,
walking arm in arm
down the middle of the gravel streets
in our pajamas, in pre-dawn empty darkness,
having stayed up all night.

Outside my window,
Diego barks an answer
to the loquacious neighborhood dogs
barking at a rare passing car,
and I put a stop to it.
I imagine Miguel Valverde, my house’s architect,
cruising by in the early morning beauty
and seeing what I’ve done to his beautiful house
that looks sculpted from clay. Bright colors. Lush plants.
Tattoos in places that seemed to me created for embellishment—
In the nichos, around the nicho-shaped doors,
along raised strips under the domes around the outside of the house,
I have finished what he began,
or, rather, I am in the act of finishing,
for as in nature, as one thing is completed,
another begins to fade.

 Once more I live with animals
like those of  the “Old Mother West Wind” stories
read to me by my father.
That one crafty remaining possum
who taunts the dogs
subs for Paddy the Beaver.
Reddi the squirrel has gone gray.

“The bees is buzzing from flower to flower today,”
my four-year-older sister dictated in a letter written to my mother
by my older sister the day I was born.
They still buzz, dear sister, here
1,700 miles to your south, as they buzz everywhere
once Mother Nature nods her head.

But today’s round of bad news
shoulders its way like a bully onto my screen,
reminding me that lately the mother and teacher of us all
has raised her hand,
slapping us into subservience to her rules.
So long as the recalcitrant bad boys in the back
continue to threaten to flaunt her rules,
until they comply, she warns,
the whole class will be punished.
The dunce in the corner wags his
orange jowls, flapping his flyaway
mop in the breeze from his senseless words.

I walk away from memories and the news,
down a small street like an alleyway in my mind
where an artist stands painting a mural
of the Virgin Mary surrounded by animals—
these creatures of earth not human
who still obey the rules of nature,
teach us a lesson.

I venture out to deal with my detritus, now scattered
half way down the block by wind and animals,
risk bougainvillea thorns to retrieve and stuff it into a plastic garbage bag,
rescue wads of paper towels compacted into gullies between the paving stones, run a race with the wind to reclaim rolling pet food cans.
Then, believing my efforts done, I turn to survey that beauty restored:
the cobblestones shadowed by
the Royal Poinciana
and littered by the paper leaves of Bougainvillea.

And see among them
the crumpled pages
of a cast-off poem
blown down the road
for half a block or more,
and so I venture farther
to deal with my mistakes.
And, once done with this task,
as though requiring more exercise,
my mind keeps walking northward
until it hits a wall.
“Keep out,” it says. “Stay in your own country.”
I do. I stay in Mexico.

 

For NaPoWriMo 2020, Apr 26 we were to fill out a questionnaire and write a poem based upon it. Here is the questionnaire:

Almanac Questionnaire

Weather:
Flora:
Architecture:
Customs:
Mammals/reptiles/fish:
Childhood dream:
Found on the Street:
Export:
Graffiti:
Lover:
Conspiracy:
Dress:
Hometown memory:
Notable person:
Outside your window, you find:
Today’s news headline:
Scrap from a letter:
Animal from a myth:
Story read to children at night:
You walk three minutes down an alley and you find:
You walk to the border and hear:
What you fear:
Picture on your city’s postcard:                

Home Sweet Home (Lens-Artist Photo Challenge 94)

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Click on photos to enlarge.

Well, I am, Mom.
Oriole

For the Lens-Artist Photo Challenge 94: At Home.

Cheerful Sighting.

4 Replies

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This is a kid art display outside a local gallery. 

For Cee’s Fun Foto: Seeing.

Commotion

18 Replies

 

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First of all, I have to explain that I live in a Mexican house with 20 ft. high domed ceilings and rooms that serve as perfect echo chambers. Also, that the plumeria tree is in bloom directly in front of my typing table and although it is beautiful, I am allergic to it. The result is that I’ve been letting out 4 or 5 tremendous sneezes per day that echo through the rooms and sometimes hurt my own ears. The climax came today when I sneezed and every dog in the neighborhood started barking–my two included!!!

 

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Empty Datebook

19 Replies

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Empty Datebook

Another lonely Saturday. The singles are all vexed—
a world of restless wallflowers, feeling they’re surely hexed.
If I may be candid, Corona’s not at fault.
You’re not some precious treasure, sealed up in a vault.
If we did our homework, we’d know the truth of it.
You didn’t have that many  dates  before the virus hit!

 

Prompts today are Saturday, Candid, Lonely, Vex and Homework.

Valuables: Saturday Stream of Consciousness Prompt

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You need to click on these to see them well.. especially the first long skinny one. 

 

Somewhere I saw a daily prompt whose prompt today was photos of things that began with  “VAL.” I put my thinking cap on and came up with “Valuables,” so I took photos of my jewelry which, although not diamonds and gold, is valuable to me. Then, in typical “me” fashion, I could not find the prompt to link it to, so if this sounds familiar to you, please clue me in with a link?  Prayers answered.. muchas gracias, Sadje, for telling me the site of the prompt.!

 

This post is part of SoCS. Find the prompt HERE. link!!!!

Royal Poinciana Tree Abloom FOTD, Apr 25, 2020

17 Replies

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I can’t seem to get a photo that does this Royal Poinciana tree in the front yard of my house justice. The sun was too bright this morning. I’ll try again this afternoon.

It’s only negative feature is that it is messy when the petals begin to fall. Here they are, above and below. Click on photos to enlarge.

 

 

For Cee’s FOTD.

Life in the Time of Corona

27 Replies

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If you wonder why this poem is so long and strange, read the prompt at the very bottom and you’ll understand. Not my fault!!

Life in the Time of Corona

It is nothing
but an April morning.
The leg cramp awakened me before the roosters.
A hot shower dissolved the cramp and blasted me awake,
sputtering at first
with air from the unused pipes,
like a voice unused too long.
Isolation “friending” me, along with the dogs,
who were delighted with my longer attention.

Tap tap on the keys into a black morning.
The lonely staccato of dogs in the distance.
Descant of bird voices
and the percussion of the fighting cocks across the road,
the left stage bray of a donkey. 
This far up the hill,
their voices rise like heat,
precursors to the church bells that seem to be in a different time zone this morning.

6:59 and still they haven’t tried to recruit me.
They’ve been trying for 19 years.
The old woman at the christening, shocked when I say I’m not Catholic, moving away an inch or two,
side-eyeing me when I miss a beat at rising and sitting, 
sit in the pew as she kneels on the kneeling bar.

Arms sore from this flat-back typing,
I consider rising.
In bed since the cramp-induced hot shower,
hair damp,
hands like sandpaper from this
Coronavirus obsessive washing,
disinfecting.
My life washed free
of appointments
and friends,
except for trips down the hill to pick up masks,
leave off notes for the illustrations of the book that might get finished thanks to this enforced “Go to your room!” by Mother Nature.

She levels her guns at us, hoping we will listen and fall into line.
Only man creating his own rules.
The world dependent
on the right people making the rules.
There have not been enough right people,
the cuckoo taking over for the owls
and the rowdy mockingbirds taking up his call.  
He sticks his head from his house too often,
repeating the first thing in his head,
stammering like a Swiss clock that needs maintenance.

Bird language fills the very early dark morning air.
So I want to move to the hammock—
bare butt as I am.
Braving mosquitos
and the early morning awakening of my neighbors.
I imagine
welt marks from the knitted fabric of the hammock,
scratch marks from Morrie leaping into the hammock after me.
No. The time for nude swinging is twenty years past
and not probable even then.
So a long robe fills my imagination,
but I do not go.
My fingers beat tattoos on the keyboard,
searching for names for the bird dialogues I am hearing.
The trilling runs of a piccolo, bassoon of the downhill donkeys, discord of a dog’s three short barks and howl, running down the scale. My house is still asleep.
Water not yet gushing from the pipes into the pool,
hot and steaming in the cool morning air.

“Go back to sleep,” that part of my lazy brain directs.
“Do the assignment,” my dutiful persona contradicts.
It is rare that the dogs do not detect my thoughts and call for kibble
within seconds of my awakening and thinking of them.
They do not stir.
Traffic noise of trucks on the carretera a mile below.

I hang on this mountain,
depending on gravity
and my house’s firm foundations.
The hard rock that resists that sliding
down the mountainside where eight years ago
it came tumbling down on either side of my house,
leaving me safe.
Since then the penance has been
cracks in the wall by the stairs
leading down from my upstairs casita.

Twenty minutes already?
My story still untold, unlocated, even.
The dark being permeated by light.
Scarlet ribbons start to flow.
The sky as I open the drapes
flooding in to me
on early morning colors.
The pale puce of the morning sky to the north.
The whistle of the whistle bird. Chirp of the chirper,
Mexico crow of the rooster..
ER ere r er without the cockle and the doo.

Where is my family?
My animal alarm clocks?
The cats stay silent in their bed in the garage,
not demanding entrance.
The dogs, mere feet away, curled in the room I built for them.
How do I feel about this forced isolation?
A relief as sorts.
Permission to do what I’ve been adding to the list for the past year:

The mural painted around the front door?
After 11 years, Jesus called asking to do the job,
all of his other commissions cancelled
as gringos flooded back to the states
like rats deserting a sinking ship,
Yet, ironically, it
seems to be America that is sinking.

Mexico bobs along on the internet and phone calls of friends asking what I need. 
Yolanda, breaking into the house to clean after a month,
bans me to the studio while she does so.
Appears the next day to clean the studio,
telling me to stay in the house,
even though I have paid her for two months
and told her to stay home.
Said I would pay as long as
anyone but the president of the USA directs.
Using his words as a rapids to avoid
during this whole rush of directives,
demands,
questions,
contradictions.
The world is being deflected off its course
by a fool supported by bigger fools,
because they have to be smarter than him and yet let their pockets replace their brains and hearts.

The big dog awakens and strolls nonchalantly past my open drapes.
A higher-pitched donkey bray.
Birds quieting into a caesura.
Where are my woodpeckers,
my early morning alarm clocks?
Every day, they awaken me,
except for when a stiffening and locking
somewhere in some limb awakens me first.
Both alarm clocks
from different sorts of limbs.

Fix the dishwasher
Make the peanut butter cookies you bought ingredients for a week ago
Finish typing up and formatting the storybook and get the illustration corrections to Isidro
Finish the Africa book
Finish the NaPoWriMo poem
Finish the prompt poem
Publish the flower prompt photo
Abandon my bed in search of hand lotion
Feed the animals
Thyroid pill
Half hour timer
Other pills and smoothie.

The time ran out five minutes ago, 
yet still I go on trying to meet all the directives.
That night on main street
in a small neighboring town in South Dakota.
Two cars pulled up driver’s window to driver’s window.
The chat.
The moving to one car.
The first kiss, ever, in this world.
The whole world changing. 
That one rebellious action
leading to a moving out into the world that never stopped.
Leading eventually to Mexico
and this morning following directions
into this avalanche of words.
Stones of unsorted sizes.
One layer covering the layer before it.
Instructions lost at the bottom of the pile.
I stop.
Ponder. 
Stop.

Yellow. Orange. Fuchsia.
My day reasserts itself.
I go back in search of it.
The weather outside is the ordinary  perfect April weather.
The weather inside is a hurricane of sneezes.
The plumeria is blooming.
My desk chair, my hammock and my pool
call out to me in that order.
Type.
Exercise.
Swing.

Anything
leaks
around
red
mornings

checking out
lazy
or
customary
kinesis.

STOP!!!!!

 

Below is the NaPoWriMo Day 25 prompt today that led to this poem, so don’t blame me. Phew:

A writing prompt toward the present tense, a meditation in everyday language, that makes room for small noticing and our most spacious perceptions.

For writing: please see the following suggestions and have them ready for a free write, selecting and using those that further your present tense engagement. Write for at least twenty minutes. You can return to this prompt and write through it numerous more times, to infinity.

  • Bring your perspective and verbs back to the present tense, even when addressing memory
  • Seek the “unforced flow of words”
  • Introduce all of the things that you might ordinarily deem incidental or too small for consideration
  • Include quoted speech (overheard, announced, in dialogue, as song lyrics)
  • Build your lines with associative accumulation (parataxis), move with your attentions
  • Introduce a swerve or observation that serves as interjection, non-sequitur
  • Include at least four colours
  • Animate the landscape or nearby object, imbue it with expressiveness of action or address
  • Include perceptions of the weather without, perceptions of weather within
  • Use a noun as verb that is typically not used that way (anthimeria): “white freaked with red”
  • Introduce the occasional 3- and 4-word sentence.
  • “Let’s make a list”: include a list of things you love
  • Did you remember to ask questions?
  • Include a hemistich line: a line made-up of two halves, of equivalent beats, hinged on a silent beat (caesura): “The world is all cut-outs then—and slip or step steadily down”

Keep writing: if you get stuck, begin again by penning a sentence that begins with the word “And…”

Keep writing: if you get stuck, repeat a word or phrase you wrote earlier and build

Keep writing: if you get stuck, perform an instant acrostic—look up and find a short word and use the letters from seeds to generate language (ex.: I performed an instant acrostic on the word “sky” to arrive at the phrase “said ‘Kill yesterday’”; see fragment of the poem drawn from “Mulberry Mess” in Red Juice below.