Tag Archives: dverse poets pub

What the —-? Palinode for dVerse Poets.

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The Invitation

“You are invited to a party at our house, Saturday at 7.
Please bring a dish to share and what you want to drink.”

 

The Reply

Pot Luck?
What the F—?

If I’m to bring a dish to share and also what I drink,
just who’s throwing the party? It sounds like me, I think.
If I’m going to cook a dish and also buy the wine,
I think I’ll just stay home instead, where all of it is mine!
The purpose for a party is for entertaining friends—
Not the other way around. This said, my poem ends!

Bumblebees (dVerse Poet’s Quadrille Challenge)

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Bumblebees

Plant some flowers, and they will come,
and though they have a fuzzy bum,
curb your finger, curb your thumb.
Have another sip of rum.
Crack your knuckles, pop your gum.
Call your sweetie, call your mum.
Bake some brownies and have you some.

Sing a ditty, whistle, hum.
Play tuba ‘til your lips are numb.
Strum your cello, pound your drum.
Sand your chair legs ‘til they’re plumb.
Pat your kitten’s furry tum,
but as these bumblebees go and come,
to pet one would be really dumb!!!!!

For the dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille Challenge: bum. Two quadrilles on this one!!

To see the challenge, go HERE.

On Picasso’s Imaginary Self-Portrait

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Picasso

 

On Picasso’s Imaginary Self-Portrait

Is it conceit or self-knowledge
that makes you paint yourself
in the ruffed collar
of Shakespeare
or a clown?

Satyr, young at heart,
your merry countenance
masks darker moods and behaviors,
the bright pigments
hiding a more somber undercoat.

Picasso,
your children
and your mistresses
might paint you as master:
stern, egotistical,
but always with the backlit inspiration
of genius.
Yet, old goat,
you paint yourself a clown.

 

Reblog For dVerse Poets: Clown

Hard Drive

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The year is 2100, and my computer’s dusty hard drive has just resurfaced at an antique store. This is a note to the curious buyer explaining what he or she will find inside.

Hard Drive

If you long for mystery,
poems, facts and history,
long perambulations
and wild exaggerations,
recipes and letters and
episodes of Homeland,
Elementary, Sherlock, Friends,
a blogging site that never ends,
Emails, Youtube, Facebook notes,
starts of novels, copied quotes,
OkCupid pictures of
possibilities for love,
notes from nice guys, threats from creeps,
notes from guys who play for keeps,
friends who only write when drunk,
chain e-mails, jokes and other junk,
two hundred drafts  of my third book,
(each one different, have a look),
kids stories and their illustrations,
the Christmas plans of my relations,
photographs of my whole life—
its happiness and pain and strife—
some successes but also follies:
fireworks, insects, gardens, dollies,
travel snaps and friendly faces,
rooms at home or foreign places,
birds and children, beaches, skies,
the  camera lens is true and wise
and not as given to fraud and lies
as writings filtered through the eyes
of one who feels the joys or pains
of what she witnesses, then refrains
from trying to change her reader’s mind
to accord with the type or kind
of thoughts she carries deep inside:
pride’s cutting edge, love’s waning tide—
then read this hard drive if you dare,
but if you fear a life laid bare,
I have one word for you. Beware.

 

For dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night

Rainy Season Morning

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Rainy Season Morning

The gray cat pressed against my knee,
saved from the rain
that patters
on the tile overhang
outside the bedroom window.

Thunder
like the great world’s indigestion,
muffled chirp of birds
under palm leaf shelters.

This morning is gentled
by the steady rain.
The massive palm frond,
made lazy by the weight of rain
that colonizes its narrow avenues,
sways sways in the gentle wind.

Dark skies,
as though the day cannot find us.
8:44 a.m. Thursday.
I pull the quilt over us
and birds fly as the frond
sways violent in a stiffer wind.

 

For dVerse Poets Pub: Capture a moment.

He

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He

would have married the girl and had children
and been less overt with his teachings
of peace and love too radical
for a world immersed in their opposite.

He would then not have changed the world, perhaps,
but  only lived in contrast
to that power popular among those who needed it
and effective in keeping those averse to it quiet.

If he had married the girl, the world would probably have ended up
pretty much how it has anyway, but he might have had a different ending.
Grown old, had his cronies over to talk about the good old days,
converted water into wine and served them loaves and fishes.

Mary Magdalene would have danced for them in their memories,
and all of his grandchildren would have listened in awe
to hear the tales of how he walked on the water,
bade Lazarus to rise from the grave.

He would shush his cronies as they started in
with tales of how he smashed the souvenir stands
and threw the money changers out of the temple.
Not stories for young ears not quite ready to learn revolution.

And all of the ill done in his name might have happened anyway,
but at least he would have had a good life.  Would have suffered less.
And some other savior might have found a way to save the world
that would have worked.

 

FordVerse Poets Pub: Write a poem about a deceased person.

 

Enforced Reflection

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Enforced Reflection

I’m keeping my composure and compensating for
the fact that they won’t let me venture out my door.
Given lemons, I make margaritas—take the opportunity
now that I can’t wander about in the wide community,
to revel in the riches that abound right here at home,
watching Jesus painting murals all around my dome.

I’m baking lots of cookies, although their fate is sad.
After painters ate just one or two, Diego was so bad
that he raced into the kitchen and made off with all the rest.
One friend suggested delicately it might have been best.
Would I have eaten any that remained? Yes, it’s true, I might.
I must admit my waistbands are getting sort of tight.

Perhaps it’s lack of exercise. Perhaps it’s medication.
Since I so rarely don street clothes, I have no indication.
I avoid the scales because, you know, they are so changeable.
Up one day but rarely down. (Wish they were more arrangeable.)
With nature as our trainer, perhaps we will be changed
in other crazy pastimes in which we’ve become deranged.

Fracking and polluting, casting all our trash
out there in the ocean, making a god of cash.
Nature has to teach us to change our foolish ways
by sending us all to our rooms to pass our “time out” days.
And perhaps now I’m sequestered and set upon the shelf,
Diego’s her reminder to take care of myself.

The image of Diego with a cookie in his mouth is from a retablo/art collage I’m making that is recording my time spent in Mother Nature’s Time-Out period. Why don’t you join me? Mine was finished but then I have to keep adding to it. At least a story a day. Diego was that day’s.

Prompts for the day are composure, compensate, opportunity, revel and trainer.
And, for dVerse Poets Pub prompt: Solitude.

Word Processing

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Word Processing

Lightning flashed,
sparking the current which fueled the dream.
Letters zinged across a field of white,
waiting for justification to join other letters
in neatly-spaced rows of words.

For split seconds between thought and white space,
they danced into the dream.
Smoothly, straight-backed l’s and i’s
slid together in magnetic minuets
while b’s and d’s bumped heavy bottoms,
vying for position.

Into the dream they went,
and then,
their brief dances over,
they froze into equal rows upon the stage
to watch the choreography
of each new letter as it joined them,
for the dream was of
entire dictionaries of words––

syllables holding hyphenated arms with syllables,
antonyms crowding synonyms in tight ironic cliques,
articles moving in swing rhythm
toward their appointed nouns.

Four rows of tables
faced the stage,
one fat spectator sitting on each table,
third row back,
surveying the white screen of the dream.

Applause issued from the table-sitters,
pushed out in broad solid farts––
brief ovations as they jumped from table to table
in swift movements
so that they themselves
seemed dancers on hot pavement.

When they paused,
it was to hover lightly over each table
before pounding short applause
with their fat rumps
and moving on.
Yet their applause was indispensable,
for it fueled the dream.

When lightning flashed again,
the dream stood still.
The dance over,
the spectators vanished
like the single-fingered ghosts they were.

Rain tapped the window,
adhering to the spider web
which hug like an intricate rope ladder
between the bougainvillea
and the window frame.

A distant alarm clock
burred into the silence.
A door opened,
and a woman
entered the empty room.

The dream called out to her from the screen,
but she did not heed it
as she disconnected the cord
that ran from the machine to the wall,
destroying its memory of the dream.
And so the poem died.

 

For dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night # 262.

Ocean Airs

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                        Ocean Airs

The surf and sand we fell down on—
a bed provided by the sea
that smoothed the sheets we lay upon.

Those stories spun out by your tongue
slipped out of you through parted lips—
portals through which your life was sung.

Letter, syllable and word
was carried by the power of breath—
each a lovely soaring bird.

How did they know to find their way
to one who coveted their sound—
their whisper and their plaintive bay?

That night stretched out upon the beach,
finally, we fell to rest
and tell our stories without speech.

For the dVersePoets Pub, we were to write a poem of tercets, using three of these sets of words as ends to lines. I broke the rules and used all five.

SPEECH REST BEACH
ON SEA UPON
WORD BREATH BIRD
WAY SOUND BAY
SUNG LIPS TONGUE

She Used to Say

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                  She Used to Say

“How many loves, Senora?” she used to say.
“Perhaps twenty,” I  would tell her.
I was forty when I married,
and I had traveled the world.

She had married at fifteen
and was a mother at sixteen.
By twenty-six, she was a mother of five.

When he drank cerveza,
he had beaten her.
She had not missed him when he left.

No more men, her children had demanded
and she’d agreed,
for the young man from El Chante who courted her now
was handsome and had money
but was not in her heart.

Still, I could see her pining
over the tall Arab
who hired the men of her pueblo.

He neither looked at her nor talked to her.
But in the night, I imagine she pined,
Arabian nights unreeling in her imagination
impossible and foreign.

One day, returning early,
I found her asleep on the divan,
a Mexican novella
rolling out of the television
into the eyeless air.

What futile dreams superseded
all these vicarious heartaches?
What magnolia-scented air
slumbered heavy in the hot layers of her sleep?

“How many loves?” she had asked me
on the road home from Guadalajara.
“Oh, many loves, “ I told her.
“I was forty when I married,
and I had traveled the world.”

 

For dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night