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.
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!
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.
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.
Solo Act
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.
Pleasure is everywhere. It’s just up to us to pick it.
Click on first photo below to enlarge your pleasure.
Thanks for the one word prompt “Clouds” today, WordPress! Guess who got a window seat on her flight between Guadalajara and Phoenix yesterday and took 206 photos of clouds? The ride, especially the landing, was bumpy but well worth it!
How handy that the prompt for today is “tourist” just as I am starting out on three weeks of travel. Do you think WordPress has spies? Here is what I see as I spin around on my stool at Johnny Rocket’s (Juan Pablo Hamburgers here) in the Guadalajara airport, right by my departure gate, where I’ve just tried to choke down 130 pesos worth of undercooked fries. (Two nights ago I spent 150 pesos for a gourmet meal and margarita at Viva Mexico in San Juan Cosala.)
So, after two weeks of exhausting preparations to get ready, here I am ready for a few weeks of leisure. Every year it takes me longer to get ready to leave, either because my life gets more complicated or because I get slower. My internet was out again today, so I’m availing myself of airport wifi to post this. More to come if I can find wifi in any of the U.S. airports. Denver bound!
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 