Tag Archives: Daily Prompt

Many Me’s

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Nude Descending a Staircase picture

The Prompt: Frame of Mind—If you could paint your current mood onto a canvas, what would that painting look like? What would it depict?

Many Me’s
If I should have to paint a picture of my present mood,
I’d be walking down a staircase, and I’d have to do it nude—
My many selves preceding me and coming fast behind—
for there would be not one of me, but many of my kind.
This scene is a mere copy of Duchamp’s solution to
a person who perhaps has found she has too much to do.

My list of tasks is growing, though I’ve dealt with one or two;
but how I’ll deal with everything, I fear I have no clue.
And so I guess my canvas style would simply have to be
like Marcel’s (though not cubist, still with more than one of me.)
That way I’d send off each of me to do what must be done.
They’d do all my labor while I went to have some fun.

While self 1 wrote my daily prompt and self 2 cleaned my shelves,
I’d go out to the water park with all my other selves.
We’d climb up all the ladders and slide down all the slides
and play a game of tug-rope where I would be both sides!
We’d go out to the ice cream place and have a cone or three
and they’d get all the calories with none assigned to me!

We’d take my bad dogs for a walk and I would be so free
Two other me’s would hold the leashes, not the actual me.
I’d loll here in my hot tub, swing in my hammock, too,
while selves from 1 to 9 would do all that I have to do.
They’d figure out my microwave instructions all in Spanish.
They’d sort out all my photographs and clean my loo with Vanish.

Agreeable to every task, they’d never mention “can’t.”
They’ll pick off all the yellow leaves from every drying plant.
They’ll organize my studio that is a horrid mess.
(It’s been that way for many months—a fact I must confess.)
They’d sort out all my closets and organize my drawers,
then go into my Filofax and sort out all the bores.

They’d shape my canned goods into rows—sorted from “A” to “Z.”
which makes it difficult for them, but easier for me.
And though my other selves keep warm from their activity,
my idleness seems not to create any warmth for me.
So although I like my colors and my brush strokes strong and bold,
I wish I’d put some clothes on us, ‘cause I am getting cold!!

The Brick Throwers

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The Prompt: Reviving Bricks—You just inherited a dilapidated, crumbling-down grand mansion in the countryside. Assuming money is no issue, what do you do with it?

The Brick Throwers

They were five in a chain from truck to rooftop,
each throwing the piles of adobe bricks
in stacks of four, from hand to hand
up from the bottom of the truckload
now nearly emptied.
Two of them waved me on
when I tried to park near,
my trunk full of heavy wall sculptures
to deliver to a gallery just half a block away.

And when I tried to park farther along the block,
again and again, they waved me away
until I was a block away and safe, I guess,
from straying bricks or errant cars that swerved
too far to the right to avoid the bricks or truck that held them.
They were a cheerful lot, and when I passed,
walking towards the gallery
carrying one sculpture after another,
they waved, and on my final trip back to the car,
again, the man second in the chain
who stood balanced on the highest level of the brick pyramid
that remained within the truckbed,
seemed to intuit my purpose, waving from me to them
as I drew my camera from my purse.
They all posed for minutes, miming their labor
as I tried to get them to actually throw, as before,
those piles of bricks, hoping to catch them
flying through the air between two pairs of hands.

Finally understanding, they threw and threw,
asking me for a prompt to help me catch that flight
I feared I’d never catch.

(more)

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Minutes later, I turned to leave
and they, cheering and smiling in their fame,
turned back to that labor which is an art in Mexico:
giving bricks wings before mortaring them
into a permanency that holds them rigid for lifetimes
until they crumble back into that soil that was their nativity.

This poem should be a metaphor for something
and probably is.
Some future day, when I am moldering in my grave
like some lesser Ozymandius,
some graduate student or scholar of mediocre
Twenty-First-Century poetry might publish a treatise
revealing it.
And they will dig this website from the rubble
of the Internet and find
I wrote it as a daily prompt
and if such records still exist,
find how I hired those men to build a monument
from that crumbling manse of brick
that was my prompt on the Daily Post
and tell how they spent their lifetimes restoring it
and how their children and their children’s children
have benefited from catcalls
and instructions to move on down the line
and the clicking of a camera lens
and from one who follows blindly
where each prompt leads her.

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Prompt? Really?

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Prompt? Really?

I wake at six and for two hours and I check and check and check.
Now 8:03 and still no prompt. I wonder, what the heck?
Can they not post the prompt so I can get on with my day?
These lazy daily prompters must be laid out in the hay
when they should be here prompting for we still have things to do!
We can’t just sit here all day long to wait and wait for you.
Just slap some words down on your site and we’ll begin to write.
For we’ve been waiting morning hours and others through the night.
In the hours we’ve waited, we have stretched and paced and stomped
and realized the truth: Your prompt is anything but prompt!!!

Finally, at 11:13, today’s prompt was posted, but I had written my blog entry between the hours of six and eight and then watched for the actual prompt to post so I could establish the link.  Alas, 5 hours of waiting was enough and today I’ll post to a different drummer!  But—I was the first to post!!!!  Ta Dah!

The prompt today, when it finally came, was if you had three wishes to grant, who would you grant them to?  No necessity for thinking about this.  I would grant one each to three women who because of the culture they have grown up in have been sentenced to death for adultery or  because they have been raped or because they have stood up to a brutal husband.

Ocean Rental

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Ocean Rental

Her towel is spread out on the beach, the cat is on the stoop.
The housewife sips her coffee while her husband sips his soup.
There are advantages to houses built upon the sand.
You do not have to leave your porch to get expertly tanned.
You dine on tuna every day that never has been canned.
When fishermen jerk in their fish and they happen to land
upon your porch, you eat them either cooked or sushi-raw.
The fisherman cannot complain, you see it is the law.
And that is how you know what hubby shoves into his face
is probably not vichyssoise, but rather bouillabaisse

The Prompt: An Odd Trio—Today, you can write about whatever you what — but your post must include, in whatever role you see fit, a cat, a bowl of soup, and a beach towel.

Obscured Fourth

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Obscured Fourth

In Mexico, it is the rainy season
and so the rain falls down.
The dogs refuse to leave their beds.
They curl instead, and I do, too,
listening to the steady drip of rain from tejas
and Pasiano’s more massive splashes
as he scoops water from the tub
which never empties,
constantly replenished
by the rains.

Now hot water streams
from pipes into the hot tub.
Mineral water heated by volcanic fire
steams as it meets cool water falling
from above and the cool air that carries it.

It is still morning, but even tonight I’ll find
no fireworks in Mexico on the Fourth of July,
for independence was not granted evenly around this world.
And I who love the fertile darkness of night,
but also love surprises
that the fireworks bring,
must patiently wait for independence to find
this new country I found 13 years ago.

No rains ever mar her independence
on September 16.
The rainy season over,
all necks will crane in the churchyard crush
to see the wild castillo
and its corona spinning, spinning
to lift off into the air above—
independence held back until finally
it cannot help but rise
to freedom.

Note: September 16 is Grito de Dolores (Mexico’s Independence Day)

The Prompt: It’s Your Party—Since many are marking their country’s “birthday” in the US today, we wanted to ask: How do you celebrate yours? Are you all for a big bash, or more of a low-key birthday boy/girl?

Changing Lines

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Changing Lines

Would passion carry the same voltage
or heartbreak the sting
if from the beginning we knew
that every extreme
brings us a step closer to its opposite?
It is that great pendulum of the I Ching—
that flowing from the yin to yang—
that foretells the fall of great regimes
glorious in their altruism
who, reaching their apex,
must head back again
towards cruel tyranny.

If we’d known this from the start,
each Summer Solstice would become
a day of mourning,
knowing that having reached one summit,
there is no further height to climb to.
And tomorrow, the start of our slow descent
will bring us closer to that other summit
where dark will reign.

Part of the power of youth’s sweet ecstasy
as well as bitter heartbreak is that it seems as though
they’ll last forever.
This is the spice of life.
Its bread comes later,
as we recognize that
everything,
everything                   everything
changes          into its
opposite.

Since today is June 21, today’s prompt was to write about the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

Dreaming A Path

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Dreaming A Path

Dream, Fri. Oct 18, 2013

We were at a booth in a café. It was a huge room with booths on every side and each booth had a clock, or at least I thought they did. I don’t think I ever looked. Our alarm started going off and there was no way to turn it off. It was by me and I tried and tried but couldn’t get it off. I said I was just going to unplug it, but Patti said perhaps it was timed with all the other clocks at tables and then it wouldn’t match. I said couldn’t they just reset it when we left? Someone agreed, but still we didn’t unplug it and it went on and on and on. Very annoying. Our booth came equipped with a little dog. It was tiny and light with long very curly white hair that was in loose corkscrew very long ringlets. It was so adorable and affectionate. I held it most of the time. It had legs like wires that went straight down..very skinny…and it jumped a lot. When the waitress came, we told her about the alarm and she said yes, she’d noticed that it was going off…but she didn’t do anything about it. We told her how cute the little dog was and she said yes…but then it seemed like it was the little dog who had the alarm that was going off. We ordered and afterwards I was wanting a dessert but thought I shouldn’t order one. Patti was to my right and I suddenly realized she was eating a very rich chocolate dessert—a sort of fudge flan or very moist slippery cake that was hot with a hot fudge sauce over it. She offered me a taste. It was a very small rectangle…not very big…but I tasted it and immediately said I’d have one, too. It was incredible. Still, the alarm went off. It was driving me crazy! Then I woke up and realized it was my own bedside alarm. I reached up with my eyes still closed and tried to turn it off, but couldn’t find the control. Finally I picked it up, opened my eyes and found the control. It was 8:10. The alarm had been going off for 10 minutes!!!!

My interpretation:

I found this dream in a folder on my computer. I have no memory at all of having dreamed it, and perhaps that distance makes it easier for me to interpret it. In a few weeks, I turn 67. For the past year, I’ve thought repeatedly about death and the fact that if I’m lucky, I probably have only 30 years left. For some reason, that awareness is very stressful. I feel a need to finish everything I’ve started and never completed. Earlier, that consisted of a lot of sorting, construction of storage spaces and weeding out of the contents of my house. That effort is ongoing. What also happened, however, is that I have an incredible drive to get everything published that has been lying around in file cabinets for many many years as well as a need to write new work and somehow disseminate it. My blog is part of that effort, as are my efforts to get all my books on Amazon and Kindle.

Seeing this dream as if for the first time, I clearly see that theme of time running out coupled by a sense of alarm that I need to do something about it. The little dog shows the attractive quality (adorable and affectionate) of finally dealing with all these loose ends—(note all his corkscrew hairs). Those wiry little legs that kept him always active certainly reflect the urgency I’ve been feeling to write write write.

One aspect of this awareness in my real life for a time consisted of my fear that I will stop breathing. This often gets me up gasping at night to run outside to try to breathe. For some reason I haven’t had any of these panic attacks since I started writing every morning. What I interpreted as a growing fear of death and a dread of ceasing to exist was perhaps a fear of not living and creating while I am alive.

I think the interplay between my sister Patti and me in the dream reflects a number of things. One is a difference in our approaches to life. I think in a way, she is more of a rule-follower and since she was my immediate pattern for most of my earlier life, I think a part of me feels this same need, but this is coupled with an equal and stronger need to create my own path in a direction unique from my two older and very competent sisters and to break a few rules to do so. At a very early age, much as I admired and imitated my sisters, I felt the need to prove myself. To find something to know that they didn’t already know. I found this route when I started venturing out at an early age to find new ground where they had not gone before me. It led me first into the homes of friends and strangers where I saw life being acted out in a manner entirely different from my own home. The road led further—to summer camp where I was a stranger to all and vice versa. I loved being the stranger. In choosing a college, I fell back on the reliability and comfort of attending the same school my sister had attended, but in my Jr. year I took my first big leap—a trip around the world on World Campus Afloat. That early adventure in seeing dozens of new and strange cultures set my life path. I’ve been traveling ever since and have been living in Mexico for the past 13 years.

I believe this dream depicts the sense of urgency I’ve had my entire life to “do” something with experience. My art and writing allow me to turn off the alarm for the hours in which I practice them. That small dessert might symbolize the rewards of doing what I need to do to do so.

P.S. An interesting insight I have had just as I started to post this: (And, interestingly enough, wordpress will not accept my blog entry. Perhaps it is insisting I add this P.S. before it does so.) I just got back to Mexico from a visit to the states wherein I visited my oldest sister Betty who is now in the depths of the world of Alzheimer’s. While I was there, she seemed increasingly distressed by the fact that she can no longer communicate, but one day as we were sitting in the living room portion of her small apartment in a managed care Alzheimer’s wing, she motioned to the middle of the floor and said, “Look a that cute little white thing there—that fluffy little white dog!” This was the first incidence that I know of of her actually hallucinating visually, and for some reason it popped into my mind in relation to the little dog in my dream. All of these images—of our dreams as well as our daily life—remind us to live while we can and to do what is most important to us. In my case as well as my sister’s—to communicate. Too late for her, although she continues to try. Not too late for me.

P.S.S.  By the way, the instant I completed the above P.S., the wordpress page that had continued to not allow me to post this blog entry flashed the message:  What do you want to post?  Text? Picture?  I chose text and and you have just read it.

The prompt: Freudian Flips. Do you remember a recent dream you had? Or an older one that stayed vivid in your mind? Today, you’re your own Freud: Tell us the dream, then interpret it for us! Feel free to be as serious or humorous as you see fit, or to invent a dream if you can’t remember a real one.

Note in response to this prompt: (When I think of dreams, I think of Jung, not Freud, and he continues to influence my thoughts and actions much more than Freud ever did.)

 

Delayed Happy Ending

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Delayed Happy Ending

Chick flicks of old all told about
mistakes that somehow all turned out.
There every moment led to the next.
One day, the thing that had them vexed
inevitably turned and turned.
The swollen nose, the fingers burned,
led to the clinic in the end
where “she” ran into a long-lost friend
who asked her to be wined and fed
along with “the one” she later wed.

This tale, however, is not my own.
For once, my inspiration’s flown.
This is the prompt I cannot take,
for if I’ve made a good mistake,
I find I can’t remember it.
My memory box has up and quit!
Bad ones? Yes. I’ve made them all.
The step that led me to a fall.
The boyfriend stalker, the friend who turned.
The candle lit, the finger burned.

Decisions made can’t be controlled.
Not all straw can be spun to gold.
I’ve drunk the milk and smelled the flower
with the bee inside. The milk? Turned sour.
I can’t remember a single time
when my mistakes have turned sublime,
yet I don’t believe all luck is rotten
I probably have just forgotten.
So if you know me, remind me, please,
of those times my sour milk turned to cheese.

If you do, I’ll write the theme
suggested to me, ream on ream.
(Or at least a stanza or a line.)
But remember, the story must be mine.
I need reminding, I know I do,
of the time fate dropped the other shoe
and turned mistakes into success—
made happy endings out of some mess
or corner I’d painted myself into.
Come on, dear friend, give me a clue!!!

Today’s Prompt: Favorite Mistake. Is there a mistake you’ve made that turned out to be a blessing—or otherwise changed your life for the better? Tell us all about it.

The Daily Post: Duck for Cover

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The prompt: Binding judgment. Does it ever make sense to judge a book by its cover—literally or metaphorically? Tell us about a time you did and whether that was a good decision or not.

 

Duck for Cover

Life’s a library where we choose
book after book to read and muse
on the truth of each, or how it serves
to amuse us or to calm our nerves.
It starts with storybooks in our youth.
Cinderella’s lovely, her kin uncouth.

The pretty sister we all adore.
The others? Rotten to the core.
We judge by beauty evermore.

As teenagers, our thoughts are filled
with thoughts of hair, complexion, build—
the ways we rank and choose our friends.
For some, this method never ends.
We judge the world by what we see.
At court, the prettiest are set free.

Our dates determined by their cars,
Our peanut butters by their jars,
Our candidates are movie stars.

World is illusion, say the seers,
the thinkers and philosophers.
We cannot know reality
by going just by what we see.
Yet time and time again, we choose
our futures based upon our views.

The “curb appeal” that meets our eye
determines which house we will buy.
The crust is how we choose the pie.

Ted Bundy had a handsome face
that drew young ladies to his embrace.
An arm sling or perhaps a crutch
brought them into his murderous clutch.
His handsomeness served to distract
till he’d performed his heinous act.

His cover perfect, his act most skilled,
he killed and killed and killed and killed—
lives ruined and ended as he willed.

Crack the book and look inside.
Talk before you choose your bride.
Drive the car before you buy.
Sip the wine and taste the pie.
See what’s inside if you are able.
Don’t go by face or box or label.

Though beauty dulled is less sublime,
scrub the tarnish from the dime.
Looking deeper takes more time.

Don’t choose the cover of a book.
Instead, take care to have a look.
One page nor twenty will not do.
You have the whole book left to view.
Avoid appearances and preening.
Look for truth and look for meaning.

George Eliot coined the adage first.
If for truth you have a thirst,
judging by the cover’s worst.