Tag Archives: Daily Prompt

Painting Outside the Lines

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Painting Outside the Lines

Our lives are made, by end of day
with rules we choose to disobey—
those pathways we choose to walk down
to find a different part of town.
Strange roads to new territory
that make the ending of our story
one unplanned, our life replotted.
All carefully scribed plans now blotted
out, with new ones wildly scribbled
in new colors brash and ribald—
breaking rules carefully set
for new patterns you won’t regret,
making our lives messier,
more “maybe” and less “yessier.”
Every rigid rule undone
might simply make our lives more fun.

 

The prompt today was disobey.

Donald, Donald

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Donald, Donald

You’ve shown us through your policies as well as how you feed
that the only real emotion you experience is greed.
Everything you come upon you brand with the name “Trump,”
Yet lack of compassion still labels you a chump.
In all your machinations, you attempt to spin the pulley.
Like other gleeful little boys, you have to play the bully.
What you have written on the world is not, Sir, what will last.
The image history makes of you you have no power to cast
unless it’s by your actions, and it’s clear what they have been.
How many evil actions have you endorsed with your pen?
Those fed their pablum with golden spoons may not develop empathy,
but that’s no reason why they couldn’t exercise some sympathy.

Things Donald Trump has named after himself: (Thanks, Wiki.)

Cancelled/never completed

Trump International Hotels

Trump sign on his Chicago Hotel and Tower

Completed/in use

Planned but never built

Former properties

Trump Plaza

In use

Trump Entertainment Resorts

Other buildings

Trump International Hotel – Las Vegas, Nevada

In use

Abandoned/never completed

Golf courses

U.S.

The 18th hole at Trump National Doral

International

  • Trump International Golf Club (Dubai)
  • Trump World Golf Club (Dubai)
  • Trump International Golf Links, Scotland
  • Trump International Golf Links and Hotel Ireland
  • Trump Turnberry (Scotland)

Former

  • Trump International Golf Club Puerto Rico[7]

Food and drink

Former

The prompt word today is sympathy. (Donald Trump during Launch of Trump Steaks at The Sharper Image at The Sharper Image in New York City, New York, United States. (Photo by Stephen Lovekin/WireImage for Hill & Knowlton)

Peculiar Little Habits

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Peek at the keys spread out on the floor.

Peculiar Little Habits

Peculiar little habits and peculiar little ways
help us pass away the hours and wile away the days.
When you enter in the door, close it exactly twice
to be sure the catch secures as solid as a vice.
Always check the doorknobs before you go to bed
to be sure the deadbolt  is completely dead.
Security is something that can’t be left to chance.
You must man the battlements and take a vigilant stance.
Do not invite strangers to wander through your home.
Give foreign folks and foreign thoughts no further place to roam. 

Seal your borders. Block people who
may be a different color from you.
Be sure that you have set a ban
on each thing unAmerican.
Burn our silks. Wipe out baklava.
While you’re at it, ban our Java.
Set up a refreshment jury
to vote on food like Indian curry.
Wienerschnitzel’s got to go.
Ban sushi. Nix gado gado.

Chocolate should be exorcised.
Ban music that’s unauthorized.
Raga, salsa and jungle beat
are rhythms we should not repeat.
America for Americans
is how we have arranged our plans.
Blood tests mandatory for sure
to make sure our blood is pure.
Send all the dark skins we have banned
to places not so tightly planned:

Prince Edward Island or Mexico
are places they’ll be forced to go—
places less pristine and picky
content to take folks slightly icky,
not perfect folks like you and me,
immaculate in our ancestry.
With endearing little habits, peculiar little ways,
we’ll wile away our hours and wile away our days
waiting for those foreign folks on whom we need to pounce,
doling out our safety by the pound, not by the ounce.

Picking fights with neighbors, casting insults at Korea,
twittering and ranting in a verbal diarrhea.
As it is above, so has it become below—
Trying to regress from what was once the status quo.
Truth becoming what we make it, in spite of evidence—
reinventing science by divine providence
Though we cannot lock out hurricanes or fires caused  by our blindness,
we have power to lock out sanity, ecology and kindness.
We’ll check our country’s doorknobs before we go to bed
and insure that all the deadbolts are completely dead.

 

The prompt word today is peculiar.

After the Honeymoon

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After the Honeymoon

The bride’s exhausted. The groom is numb.
I think that they have overcome.

The prompt today is overcome.

Odd Little Saturday Morning Poem

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Odd Little Saturday Morning Poem

I lie in bed, flat on my back, head raised by pillows,
computer raised to eye level
by a wadded comforter over bent knees.
I listen to raised voices in the village down below,
the staccato of an inadequately mufflered car revving up,
a hammer falling on wood, birds in the coco  palms.
A pianissimo chorus of dogs spread
over the surrounding hills swells to a frenzied crescendo,
then falls silent but will swell again.

I have dropped obligations
like clothes shed for a lover.
My Saturday morning pool aerobics and Zumba,
I slipped out of years ago.
Group luncheons hang from doorknobs and chair backs.
Committee meetings lie sloppily abandoned in the hall.

I have retired from the running of the world
to run my own small universe on paper.
Saturday morning is my brainstorm session
with “Me,” “Myself” and “I.”
“I” suggested feeding the dogs,
but they are quiet now, so
“Me” suggested we let them lie.
“Myself” laid out some words to dry
in the heat of the fire of our communal
inspiration, laying them smoothly on the page,
rumpling up others in her fist to send them sailing
to join the crumpled singles event invitations in the corner.

This slow Saturday morning dressing of pages
and stripping them bare
is a sort of ceremony celebrating seizing time
and making it my own.
Pages  fill up with passion, angst, anger,
irritation, joy, laughter, camaraderie.
There is more than one word for each.

Imagine such control over your world–
not having to live the world of any other.
If you could have any life you wish?
Imagine a Saturday morning  building it.

The prompt today was crescendo. This is a reprint of a poem written a few years ago.

The Finite. What We Can’t Fight.

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Universal Biography

In the end, all the same.
Although remembering your name,
eventually no one knows
the you that lived beneath your clothes.

They may see your charming smile,
your tender looks or cunning guile,
but they won’t have the faintest clue
of the authentic, inner you.

Perhaps we start out all the same;
so who’s the one that we should blame
when some turn into Phyllis Dillers
and others into serial killers?

Ghandi, Hitler, Bundy, and
the rest of us, by nature’s hand
instilled with sin or piety
in infinite variety.

But still, at end of life, we fall,
not so different after all.
At the very end of day,
returned to dust, we blow away.

 

The prompt word today is “finite.” This is a reblog of a poem I wrote two years ago.—

Anticipation

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Today is that day I’ve been anticipating for months—the day I take the girl kittens in for spaying and the boy for neutering.  Since I don’t have that much time to write, I put today’s prompt word “anticipate” into my search engine on my blog and this is the former post I came up with to reblog: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2016/10/03/water-and-rocks/.
It takes awhile to find the word anticipate in it–as a matter of fact it is the third word from the end, but I enjoyed reading the story and seeing the photos as though someone else had written them, so perhaps you will, too.  There is an accompanying link to the story I wrote about our huge landslide many years ago.

I can hear the kittens meowing from three rooms away.  They want to be fed and poor babies, it can’t be done before their surgery.  I’ll be glad when their little ordeal is over.  I’m also anticipating the time when they can safely be released to the great outdoors and there will be fewer kitty litter boxes to clean.  Will I suffer empty nest syndrome?  They’ll still be around, but will be mainly outside cats.  Preparing them in anticipation of January’s house sitters who are allergic to cats.  And my friend Patty who is allergic to cats.

Okay, please his that blue URL link above and go back with me in time to another rainy season, another thrill of nature aside from abandoned kittens and murdered bats.  Still sorry about that one.

Before and After

No time to sort these, but below are 3 months of kitten shots from the first day they were mysteriously gifted to me to the present.  Now we are off to insure no new kittens are in my future!

Click on first photo to enlarge all and read captions.

 

Standing up to Annie to steal her meal. First time I saw kittens
First day I found them, feeding the starving kittens.
Dinner time, 3 months ago
Meal time a few weeks ago.
Meal time now. Two dishes necessary
Ollie Then
Ollie now. (In front.)
Kitten pileup at approx 3 months
Ollie and Roo at about 6 weeks old
About 16 weeks old.
6-8 weeks old.

The prompt was anticipate.

Seeking Acclaim

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Acclaim

Those who seek to elevate
their fame with words too profligate
often find that others balk
at such narcissistic talk.

One heard tooting his own horn
is often lonely and forlorn.
When it comes to charity,
many have reached parity
who do not need to try to flout it,
let alone to shout about it.

Others have performed great acts
without broadcasting the facts
of honors won or feats achieved,
and one who boasts is oft believed
to be exaggerating––or,
is simply thought to be a bore

So, even though you’re justly proud,
please don’t voice that fact out loud.
If your act is worth a plaudit,
best leave it to another to laud it!

 

The prompt word is elevate. (Rerun of a poem written three years ago.)

Continuing Education

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Continuing Education

It’s true that school is great for teaching gerunds, nouns and clauses.
Also for the how-to-do’s, the whens and the becauses.
And so I don’t regret my years in university
learning of the human mind and its diversity.

Couplets, sonnets, iambs—their knowledge served me well.
Chaucer took me to Canterbury. Dante? Straight to Hell.
Will Shakespeare gave me standards of wit to try to mimic,
and modern poets formed my taste from  Oliver to Simic.
But where I really found a classroom that appealed to me
was after school was over, when I was finally free.
Backpacking was geography: islands, mainlands, seas,
and I learned my geology rock-hunting on my knees.

I learn a little bit of life from everyone I meet—
the art of speech in barrooms, diplomacy in the street.
Biology from baby birds fallen from the nest
and taught to fly from towel racks, their wings put to the test.

All the art I ever studied simply came from looking—
geometry in midnight skies, chemistry in cooking.
And though the internet gives facts in every form and guise,
It’s life that serves us best because it’s life that makes us wise.

 

The prompt word today is educate. This is a rewrite of a poem written over two years ago.

Priceless Treasure

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Unstarched

My ladies writing group is classy—never crass or gaudy.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I found they can be bawdy!
Just one impromptu potluck and a few bottles of wine
turned their metaphoric minds to matters far less fine.
For Jenny had just mentioned that a friend had lately lent her
a rather naughty film that nonetheless had really sent her
off into the paroxysms of unbridled laughter—
the kind that take you wave-on-wave and leave you aching after.
I’d been needing that for months—my life had been sedate
since my old gang had moved away and left me to my fate
of no last-minute games of train and late-night jubilation,
for though I still have good friends here, I lack that combination
of friends that I enjoy who all enjoy each other, too,
enough to create silliness to make my nights less blue.

“Bad Grandpa” was the film we watched, and though I must admit
I watched behind spread fingers for at least a fifth of it,
still the antics had us all just rolling on the floor
—starting with a snicker and then ending with a roar.
Scatology is not my thing, nor are pratfalls or shtick,
yet still I must admit to you, I got a real big kick
from this film filled with all of them. I think the ladies did, too.
It threw a bit of spice into our literary stew.
And as they left, I think we knew we’d shared a priceless treasure,
for there’s nothing that unites us like a mutual guilty pleasure!

 

The prompt today was priceless. I’ve chosen to rework a poem from three years ago when I had so few readers that I’m sure few of you have read it before.