Tag Archives: Daily Prompt

It Was a Tiny Cavity


It was a tiny cavity squeezed under the stair,

and when she chose to hide in it, nobody found her there.
Her mother didn’t know of it. Nor did her dad or brother.
This space was hers entirely. It belonged to no other.
It’s good for girls to have a space for dreams and privacy
to seal away the princess from towers and piracy.
A special place to wonder in. A sequestered place to think—
a place that isn’t ruffled or gingham, laced or pink.
A quiet place for only her to deal with the gestation
of all those massive ponderings that lead to maturation.
In a year or two she’ll grow too large for such small spaces
and she’ll be off to treehouses and other private places.
Until then, do not bother her. Leave that girl alone.
As her imagination she scrapes down to the bone,
a soup of creativity will simmer out of it
and carry her along with it once she doesn’t fit
into that tiny womb your house hid beneath the stair
in case a curious little girl needed a place back there.

The prompt today is cavity.

The Inkling

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The Inkling

I haven’t an inkling what I ought to do
about that weird spot on the tongue of my shoe.
Don’t know how it got there, don’t know what its made of.
And such a strange color! I don’t know the shade of
odd pigment that it might be properly called—
somewhere between baby pig and grandpa-bald?

What color is pink to end up on your shoe?
With pink on his toe, what’s a fellow to do?
If there were a shoe wash, I’d go in a blink,
but since there is no sort of place, then the sink
is the place I will go to to wash off this matter—
this slimy soft substance that looks like a batter.

You may think I’m silly to make such a fuss,
to blather and worry and mumble and cuss,
but these shoes are brand new and my favorites, at that—
undeserving of refuse left by the cat.
Now the cat’s in the barn and the shoe is restored.
Almost. Must that shadow just be ignored?

I’ve dined out on this story ’till friends are all bored.
As they approach me, I hear them say, “Lord,
protect us from more boring talk of his shoe.
Please let him not mention that gloppy pink goo.”
They may call me a heel, these folks I’m among
as I tell them once more how the cat got my tongue.

But I can’t abandon those images that
that mess on my shoe was left by the cat.
On what innocent creature might she have dined—
its tiny pink corpse so sadly reclined
on the tongue of my perfectly saddle-soaped shoe?
My friends will not listen, so I’m telling you!!

 

The prompt today was inkling.

 

Behaving French

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Behaving French

Today I find it suitable
to practice my inscrutable.
It’s part of my act femme fatale
that men can’t fathom me at all.

They’re wiles my mother taught to me
back when I was only three,
and I admit it’s served me well
putting bon vivants through hell.

When situations new astound me,
I wrap my femme fatale around me.
I use it everywhere I go,
’cause it’s the only French I know!

The prompt today is inscrutable.

Dark Against Light

 

 

Dark Against Light

The universe’s fine maquette

is light on dark and dry on wet—
her quietness and stillness set
against the thrum of castanet.
It is a sort of etiquette:
opposite versus opposite.
Victory gauged against regret.
Sunrise followed by sunset.
Every lottery and bet
boundless riches as well as debt.
It does no good to fuss and fret.
This irony is all we get—
nature one pure brightness set
as backdrop to our silhouette.

 

Want more views of this sunset?  Go HERE.
The prompt today is one of the prettiest words in the English language: silhouette.

Trilling

Click on any photo to enlarge all.  jdbphotos

Trilling 

Don’t you hear the mockingbird
trilling out the whole absurd
story of the passing year,
giving voice to shock and fear?

Listen to the mourning dove,
warning us from far above,
the starlings, wrens and birds of prey.
Our debts all nature has to pay.

How can it be that those in power
sit and ponder and yet cower,
too intent on their own needs
to enact necessary deeds

to bring a tyrant fool to task—
to do what all the sane men ask?
Shame on these godly well-heeled men
who fold their hands and say amen,

but let sick children go untreated,
tenements to go unheated,
our waterways to be polluted,
laws and edicts instituted

that benefit the filthy rich
to raise themselves another niche

while milling masses unenlightened
vote heedless as their belts are tightened,

favoring the autocrats
in fear of what the democrats
“might” do, when all around them all
democracy proceeds to fall.

Hear  her there, up on the limb,
surveying all who follow him?
Simple nature mocking us?
Laughing at our furious fuss?

Perhaps more knowing than we know
when raging fires and piles of snow
assault us, it is nature’s way
to lead us and to have its say.

We cannot think of only our
needs and exercise our power
for special interests without paying.
This is what all of nature’s saying.

Mudslides, hurricanes and drought
may show us what it’s all about.
Balance, sanity and sharing
fairness, ecology and caring

will bring about a world that’s lasting
beyond our legislature’s casting.
God-fearing men, do you care
about how your children fare?

And as those whom we’ve elected,
oh so naïvely selected
pad their pockets and close their eyes,
our world around us swiftly dies.

Those are the truths clearly absurd
told to us by the mockingbird.
He sits above on swaying limb.
Why are the masses deaf to him?

The prompt today is trill.

Happy Ending

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Happy Ending

He was a follower, a grunt
who married a lass dominant.
She led, he followed in their dance.
He wore an apron, she the pants.
It was a perfect unity
if folks had only let them be;
but, alas, the other blokes
had to make the usual jokes.

They called him pussy-whipped and meek—
berated him as timid, weak—
and so, simply to please his mates,
to end their jeering cruel debates,
he went against his true love’s wishes
and refused to do the dishes.

The facts, there’s no need to imbue.
Both words and dinner plates, they flew.
He could not match her swift invective
of ways in which he was defective,
and so he simply stood and waited
until her fury was abated,
then asked this cyclone he had wed
if she would like to go to bed.

Their skirmish ended in romance.

He shed his apron, she her pants.
A worn-out lover well-behooves
a meeker husband in his moves,
and nothing like a little tiff
to make a timid fellow stiff.
Now that her angst had flared and passed,
he got to be on top, at last.

The prompt today is dominant.

Irony Intentional or Serendipitous ?

When I contacted the tech help at WordPress this morning at 10:00, telling them the prompt word had not been published yet even though it is usually posted promptly at 8, was it intentional irony or serendipity that the prompt word turned out to be “tardy?”

The prompt today was tardy–in more ways than one!!! As was my link to it.  I didn’t realize until 5:30 this afternoon that I was tardy as well, not in writing the post, but in linking it. Thanks, forgottenman, for pointing this out! Something in the air today, I guess.

Double Betrayal

 

Double Betrayal

Her thoughts in parting were most candid,
her emotions, clearly branded
on her face. They reprimanded
him for how he cruelly stranded
her within their love affair—
how he left her standing there
alone, heartbroken, vulnerable.
How he’d burst her true love’s bubble.
Thus was her earlier promise broken
before a single word was spoken
when she met them, face to face,
engaged in intimate embrace—
that one who was to be her mister
with her faithless younger sister.

 

The prompt today is candid.

Listless

Listless

I don’t have any strategy, I don’t have any plan—
no recipes for muffins, no plots to meet a man.
My life is so unstructured that I have nary a list.
With no clearcut tomorrow, my future’s in a mist.
If I were only twenty, I guess they’d call me fickle.
To be so directionless would land me in a pickle.
At seventy I’ve joined the list of lives that are expired.
I’m finally giving up and saying I’m fully retired!
My alarm clock’s in the cupboard––abandoned. I don’t need it.
I gifted this year’s calendar to someone who will heed it.
No meetings on my calendar. No notes upon my fridge.
I don’t attend aerobics. I gave up playing bridge.
How do I fill my life out now that I’ve come unwired?
Now that it’s gone unplotted and its furnace gone unfired?
I’m letting every day I meet just unwind and unravel.
Letting fate determine what pathway I will travel.
My compass needle disengaged, I’m floundering in “free—”
All things now determined by serendipity.

The prompt today is strategy.

Near Horizons

Near Horizons

You have your own horizon, and my dear, I have mine;
but whatever journeys we take towards our decline,
no matter how we see our end—that final box of pine—
I do not want my journey to be a narrow line.
There are so many hills to climb before that last recline.
A few surprises would be good. Adventures would be fine.
I have a few more lives to live before that number nine!
And when it comes––that time when I must meet with the divine,
it will do no good to fight it—to struggle or to whine.

I hope that it comes quickly as I lie supine.

The prompt today is horizon.