Tag Archives: Daily Post

Nightmare

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Nightmare

You hide yourself in shadows deep
to watch me as I fall to sleep.
Half-lidded, with your sleepy stare,
you cup my cheek and stroke my hair.
I do not know as I fall deeper
that you stalk this drifting sleeper.

Then just as I do not resist,
you give my hair a painful twist.
I try to jerk awake but fail.
I tense my muscles, fight and flail,
but I cannot escape your grasp.
I call for help, I moan and gasp.

Sir Nightmare, from where do you come
with death knoll beat on ragged drum?
I hear its pulse now through the day.
At every hour, it sounds the way
back to the horror of the night––
a pathway to that final fight

when I will mount at last that steed
that nightly stands to do its deed
to carry to oblivion
this sleeper off to meet her kin.
That father lost, those lovers three
who wait for my delivery.

Is this nightmare just a dream––
a mere digression from the stream
of conscious thought––a nightly swim
through a fantasy most grim,
or a window showing me
an inevitability?

(The photo is intended only as an illustration and has nothing to do with the person pictured!!!)

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/nightmare/

Home Traveler

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Home Traveler

A journey’s long, a trip is short.
You trip on the stairs or tennis court,
but you journey into foreign places–
encounter unfamiliar faces.
So when I finally go to bed,
I journey far within my head,
those trips to town forgotten while
I journey mile after mile.
Eschewing trips to foreign places,
I journey into inner spaces.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/a-journey/

Guest

12 Replies

The Guest

Even though I try my best
to be the perfect sort of guest,
I fear I often foul the nest,
shedding objects east and west.
My flip flops and my cast-off vest
fall like petals as I get dressed.
I had not planned to be a pest,
with icebox leavings and the rest.
Hair brush, hairbands, toothbrush, Crest,
are left beneath the medicine chest.
And though I seem to speak in jest,
I fear that I have failed some test.
I have considered leaving, lest
this visit, started with such zest,
be ended at my host’s behest.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/guest/

Thumbscrews

1 Reply

Thumbscrews

At what point might your courage fall 
and might you deign to tell it all?
What waterboard or thumbscrew might
cause you to give up the fight
to tell the secrets of friend and kin
just to stop the pain you’re in?
Please friend, before revealing facts
involving secrecy or pacts,
consider what I tell you here
before you choose to grace my ear.
Never would I tell your pain—
repeat your secrets e’er again—
under normal circumstance,
nor betray by eye or glance
anything once told to me
with a vow of privacy.
Until, that is, the knives come out
or waterboards?  Without a doubt
gross cowardice would be revealed.
To torture I would surely yield.
In short, in matters of gross pain––
I would repeat your words again.
So if you have a secret dark
that you have a need to park
inside the conscience of another,
please tell your sister or your brother,
for a wise decision it would be
to choose a braver soul than me!

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/cowardice/

Desert

13 Replies

Desert-poem-4

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/desert/

Glass

5 Replies

Glass En Masse

It’s sometimes seen as goblets stored upon a shelf
where you can either look right through or stare back at yourself.
In a glass of tea leaves, your future may be spoken,
but its message like its holder may slash us when it’s broken.
It is a perfect metaphor of all that we may be––
on one hand pure distraction, on the other help us see.
Whether it’s a looking glass or one you see right through,
The glass you stand in front of mostly tells us about you.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/glass/

Early Morning Profundity

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At 4 a.m. this morning, my niece was calling out in her sleep again for almost an hour, so I grabbed my laptop from the floor beside the bed to record her comments. Then as I was about to fall asleep with my computer on my lap, I had an idea for a poem.  Without opening my eyes, I wrote it down before going back to sleep. Here it is, as I discovered it when I woke up this morning:

I’ve been axeoa rhw oxwN.

I’CW Ailws xeoaa rhw aw

ONLY RO SIAXOCWE

RHWEW IA NO PLxw doe mw

aILIF ON RHW VEINWY,

Ailinf on rhw qrwe.

InarwS I’M ARyinf ahoewaisw

wzXRLY QHWEW I OUFHR RWE.
My advice? Never write a poem in the middle of the night with your eyes closed.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/forbidden/

Solo Act

1 Reply

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Solo Act 

 A lady from Schenectady,
wishing for autonomy,
said she’d choose lobotomy
before she’d choose monogamy.
Some girls just need to be free
to be whatever they can be.
Not for them the lover’s knee,
or every morning pleasantry
called for when “I” becomes a “we.”
And so they state it blatantly.
They’ll have no other he or she.
They are content to just be “me.”

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/autonomy/

Sunday Trees, July 3, 2016

5 Replies

https://beccagivens.wordpress.com/2016/07/03/sunday-trees-242/

Licks

9 Replies

Observing the burning off the hugely overgrown lot next door was a bit like viewing burning tea leaves. I saw a woman in a turban riding a giant frog among a hundred other images over the three nights it took to complete the burn. What do you see? Yes, it did get scary.  And very very smoky.  I especially like the shot of the LED lights on the plants next to my pool with the glow from the burn behind them.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/burn/