Tag Archives: daily addictions

Water Fetish

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Water Fetish

From my time of birth up to my years septuagenarian,
if it were my choice, I always chose to be riparian.
I hate the sound of silence, for I find it rather static,
but I love the sound of water, be it tidal or erratic.

A little water rushing by or falling from a height
is lulling to my hearing and pleasing to my sight.
It contributes to my happiness, creates a sense of calm—
a sensory diversion that serves me as a balm.

So to add to my contentment, no need for feast or cake.
Just plant me by a river or a waterfall or lake.
There is only one thing that you need to know.
If you want to make me happy, just provide the H20!!!

Click on any photo to enlarge all.

The prompt words today are erratic, feast, riparian and contribute. Here are the links:

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/12/fowc-with-fandango-erratic/
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/12/wednesday-rdp-feast/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/12/riparian/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/daily-addictions-2018-week-36/contribute

Christmas Gifts

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Click on first photo to increase the size of all and to read captions.

With our Xmas dolls, in Betty’s green checked bedroom.
A teenage Xmas in the new house. Note the giant shell hairdryer.
Dressed up for Xmas by my older sister.

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My mother was the hero of Christmas. Decorated waste paper baskets from the church bazaar, that “Skunk” game I’d been begging for, played once and never again, that one last doll when I was eleven, purchased more for her own nostalgia than my need. The tree went up as the orange and brown of Thanksgiving was disposed of, and the jubilation of Christmas stretched on until New Years, when the tree came down.

For my dad, however, the end of Christmas was never quick enough. The tree lights hurt his eyes, he said, but I always wondered if there was more to it than that: some sparsity of the Christmases of his past that had broken its spirit in the heart of a young boy raised on a South Dakota prairie that furnished few rewards, let alone extravagent Christmases, but still expecting more, perhaps, than an orange in the toe of his sock. A pony, maybe, or a stick of hard candy, a jaunty new blue winter stocking cap or simply a mother  more given to Christmas than his own busy midwife of a mother, always off to somewhere else.

In our mad months of enthusiasm over tinsel, ornaments resurrected from the attic and the mystery of wrapped boxes, we overlooked the remnants of that little boy’s pain, but some part of each of us, detecting it by some subconscious radar, never gave up trying to heal those hurts of former Christmases with tiny Black Hills Gold tie tacks, new wallets and papier-mâché sculptures meant to prod him from his apathy. It never quite worked, except for that sculpture, ugly in its craziness, laughed and pondered over, then left to age and weather on their unroofed patio until its demise, giving one small hope of reviving a small boy’s wonder over Christmas and the unexpected. His forbearance over the years made him, perhaps, another subtler hero of Christmas, just in his putting up with it.

The prompt words for today are orange, game, hero, jubilation and quick.  Here are the links:

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/11/rdp-tuesday-prompt-orange/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/11/fowc-with-fandango-game/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/11/hero/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/daily-addictions-2018-week-36/jubilation
https://dversepoets.com/2018/09/10/quadrille-64-quickwrite-something/

Stemming the Rage

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Street Mural on wood viewed in Guanajuato

 

Stemming the Rage

To seed grace and stability in these tempestuous times,
try not to retaliate in your tweets and rhymes.
Simply state the truth as you continue to perceive it.
If you do not stir angst you’re less likely to receive it.
Choose not to participate when small minds rant and bray.
Just find a saner audience you’re likelier to sway.
This isn’t always easy. Ghandi led the way,
and he moved the British at the end of day.

Whether Trump or Kim Jong-un, Hitler or Pol Pot 
could be swayed by passive resistance? Perhaps, or perhaps not.
But surely there are other souls—even ones of note
who might be nudged to change their minds and even change their vote.
If you can curb your anger and respond with facts and sanity,
perhaps you’ll find a route to chip away at their inanity.
Please take with a grain of salt this lesson that I preach.
Actually, I must admit, it’s me I’m trying to teach.

 

Word prompts for today were: grace, stability, tempestuous and retaliate. Here are the links:

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/rdp-monday-grace/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/10/fowc-with-fandango-stability/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/tempestuous/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/daily-addictions-2018-week-36/retaliate

On the Bottle

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On the Bottle

Even though the likelihood I’ll do so might diminish,
the few times  I’ve been tipsy, I’ve still made it to the finish.
And though the fact I crawled the last few blocks made me most pensive,
you must admit my efforts to get home were comprehensive!

Okay, here are the real prompts for today: comprehensive, tipsy, diminish

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/09/fowc-with-fandango-comprehensive/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/tipsy/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/diminish

A New World’s Morning

8 Replies

Click on any photo to enlarge all and view as slide series.

 

Ubiquitous networks of  highways crisscross the face of Mother Earth–lines that age her fresh face. Pockmarks of potholes question their durability, whereas Earth lives on, in one form or another.

Dams crack and spill their water freshly across lake beds parched for centuries.
Bones of dinosaurs peek out from eroded banks of clay. Plants spread from potholes in gouged pavement. Somewhere in the arctic ice, the past lies thawing, ready to be reborn.

Who knows but that the
nightfall of mankind may be
a new world’s morning?

 

I don’t know what I did this week.  I seem to have collected prompts from a different week for each prompt site.  Perhaps I’ve been at it too long and should retire. The prompt words  I somehow collected were highway, durable, ubiquitous and morning. The form is for dVerse Poets haibun challenge.

Darn! I now find even the comments and Mr. Linky for dVerse are closed, even though they say they are open all week.  I guess this just isn’t my day, or I am as cracked as the pavement above…..Here are the “wrong” links I used:

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/01/fowc-with-fandango-highway/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/daily-addictions-2018-week-34/durable
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/ubiquitous/
https://dversepoets.com/2018/09/03/haibun-monday-good-morning/

 

If We Listened to the Birds

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On the dive,

Click on any photo to enlarge all.

If We Listened to the Birds

If I were a mighty bird,
fluent in both voice and word,
when the weather shifted colder,
I’d wing myself to royal shoulder,
have a perch and, I confess,
use all the powers I possess
to loosen up and leave my mark
on that stodgy matriarch,
to feel my presence and touch of wings
and know what necessary things
each creature in nature brings with it.
How each thing comes together to fit.

This I would find exhilarating.
By my presence, educating
the powers-that-be to think of nature
as more than just a nomenclature.
Perhaps I’d tell the president
that I have been heaven sent
to tell the powers that abide
that God’s not really on their side.
God would have us guard our earth
There’s more than money that marks its worth.
All of nature, without a doubt,
makes the world of man work out.

If those large personalities
who run our world would only, please,
take heed of what I have to say,
we’d survive to live another day,
another year, another eon.
We’d have a peaceful planet to be on.
The brother eagle that guides their flight
knows too well extinction’s plight.
The symbol there that marks their seal
is anguished over the ordeal
that fellow creatures of nature face
because of loss of living space.

Our national parks sold off for oil,
waters from which fish recoil,
oceans plugged with plastic waste
we idly cast off in our haste.
While politicians rail and bicker,
our society grows sicker.
Hospitals far out of reach,
schools encouraged not to teach
science, but religious fable
that makes the politicians able
to pull the wool over the eyes
of those who believe their disguise.

It’s true that often what we get
is exactly opposite
of what they promise, their rhetoric
stirring us to moods euphoric
when in fact they’re empty words
meant to bilk admiring herds.
Look deeper at what they profess.
They promise more, but give us less.

The prompts for today are bird, royal, exhilarating, possess. Here are the links, in case you want to play along:

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/08/rdp-saturday-bird/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/08/fowc-with-fandango-royal/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/08/exhilarating/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/09/02/daily-addictions-2018-week-35/possess

Where Fury Drives Us

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Where Fury Drives Us

Rash words often generate a sort of tidal force
that set us on a feckless, anger-driven course
that minds no preset schedule, no life path we have chosen.
All of our potential null, we seem now to be frozen
in a pointless fury that drives us to an end—
that inevitable collision that waits around the bend.

The words of the day are schedule, rash and generate.

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/07/fowc-with-fandango-schedule/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/07/rash/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/ generate

 

Manifesto for the Midterms

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Manifesto for the Midterms

Mere pontificating will not win my trust.
Words with no fair justice fade away to dust.
If greed and ambition are part of what you teach,
move on to another. I’m far beyond your reach.
But if you seek a balance and fairness for posterity,
rightness for the earth and a sharing of prosperity.
If you do not seek to govern by appealing to false fear,
then climb up on your bandbox.  I’ll give your words an ear.

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/05/fowc-with-fandango-balance/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/pontificate/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/09/02/daily-addictions-2018-week-35/ambition

Interwoven

9 Replies

 

Interwoven

Life is like a tapestry, warp giving strength to weave.
Each birth’s celebration a potential loss to grieve.
We might wrangle living’s fairness, its giving and its taking—
one soul giving into sleep as a new soul is waking.
Its weave may seem circuitous, beginnings onto leavings,
all the energy of life–its lovings and its heavings,
yet the flaw within the tapestry is what gives it its beauties.
The pleasures of the life we live are leavened by its duties.

 

The prompts today are energy, tapestry, circuitous, wrangle.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/04/rdp-tuesday-prompt-energy/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/04/fowc-with-fandango-tapestry/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/04/circuitous/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/wrangle

Lazy Man’s Creed

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Lazy Man’s Creed

How I loathe a hard day’s labor at the furrow or the stile.
It makes me cross and angry. I become volatile!
A sage once gave me this advice: what’s earned will serve thee best,”
but I quipped back with, “Any labor undone is the best!”

The prompt words today were labour, loathe, sage and volatile. Here are the links:

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/03/rdp-monday-prompt-labour/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/03/fowc-with-fandango-loathe/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/03/volatile/volatile

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/sage