Happy Ending
It’s typical and just my luck
that when the fruit fell from the truck,
I didn’t adequately duck,
and so was splattered with its muck.
My hungry hens began to cluck.
The honey bees began to suck.
They made a meal of former yuck!
https://dversepoets.com/quadrille/yuck
The dVerse Poets prompt today is to take something we’ve written on September 11 of another year and to take a word or idea from that piece and write a new piece. Here is my Sept. 11 essay from 2015 that I am going to draw from. There is a link at the bottom of that post that will bring you back to the poem I’ve written today based on that post from three years ago. Wow. Complicated. Here is my present-day poem based on the word “handwritten.”Panned by Hand
Words slowly written out by hand
will in future years be panned
as much as petroglyphs in stone
carved out by flint or sharpened bone
are an anathema today,
now that we have a simpler way
to write with pencil or with pen.
Will kids remember way back then
when moms and grandmothers and dads
wrote out notes on legal pads,
or will they only go to see ’em
in a history museum?Cell phones don’t run out of ink,
spew words as fast as you can think,
don’t use up paper, wood or lead,
just use up gigabytes instead.
Thus handwriting’s a bygone art—
i’s carefully dotted with a heart,
those flourishes at ends of lines—
those curlicues and hearts and vines
scribbled in the margins? Vanished.
All our doodlings soon banished.It is the truth that progress brings
technology to replace things
dear to our hearts we thought would be
carried on by progeny.
But, alas, it is not so.
Typewriters were the first to go,
then cursive followed recently,
and soon I’m sure the powers that be
will decide all writing’s out,
and soon technology will tout
communication via brain
and then my friends, once more again
the means we’ve used to share our thought
will be outmoded, no longer taught
by school or university.
Mere ESP will surely be
worked out so we need only blink
to transmit all that we might think.Imagine, then, the problems caused
by thoughts inadequately paused.
Words penned in ink can be crossed out,
or crumpled up and then tossed out.
Not so words received as we think them—
flirtings known before we wink them.
So long, subtlety and tact.
Hello, naked glaring fact.
No thoughts scrawled or written with care.
All meaning caught in truth’s harsh glare.
The truth is, friends, that each advance
may neither further nor enhance.
Some advancement only fetters.
All in all, I prefer letters!Here is the link to dVerse Poets Tuesday Poetics in case you want to see what others did with this prompt: https://dversepoets.com/2018/09/11/poetics-on-a-loop/
We Fill in the Blanks
I write notes three times weekly in my limping Spanish for Yolanda, not because I won’t see her, but because I probably won’t remember by then what I need to tell her. She has asked me to order more vacuum cleaner bags from the states. I use the words I know, and tonight the word for vacuum has escaped my memory. So I leave this note on the kitchen island, taped to a filter I’ve found in the laundry room:
“Is this the bag for the machine for clean the floor?”
Es este la bolsa para la machina para limpiar el piso?
Then, taped to the stove top:
I’m sorry, Yolanda, but a potato broke in my oven and it is very bad! I worked for one hour and a half but it is still bad now.”
Lo siento, Yolanda, pero una papa romper in…
View original post 142 more words
Excuse # 2
Quick, take my hand before I float off
on a breeze or a sigh or a sneeze or a cough.
No telling what currents are swelling today
to pick a girl up and float her away.
Oh, excuse number one?
Hand holding is fun!
For DVerse Poets: https://dversepoets.com/2018/09/10/quadrille-64-quickwrite-something/
Click on any photo to enlarge all and view as slide series.
Ubiquitous networks of highways crisscross the face of Mother Earth–lines that age her fresh face. Pockmarks of potholes question their durability, whereas Earth lives on, in one form or another.
Dams crack and spill their water freshly across lake beds parched for centuries.
Bones of dinosaurs peek out from eroded banks of clay. Plants spread from potholes in gouged pavement. Somewhere in the arctic ice, the past lies thawing, ready to be reborn.
Who knows but that the
nightfall of mankind may be
a new world’s morning?
I don’t know what I did this week. I seem to have collected prompts from a different week for each prompt site. Perhaps I’ve been at it too long and should retire. The prompt words I somehow collected were highway, durable, ubiquitous and morning. The form is for dVerse Poets haibun challenge.
Darn! I now find even the comments and Mr. Linky for dVerse are closed, even though they say they are open all week. I guess this just isn’t my day, or I am as cracked as the pavement above…..Here are the “wrong” links I used:
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/01/fowc-with-fandango-highway/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/daily-addictions-2018-week-34/durable
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/ubiquitous/
https://dversepoets.com/2018/09/03/haibun-monday-good-morning/
Java 101
It was 1965, my freshman year at the University of Wyoming, and once again I was venturing out into the world by going home for the first time with a college friend. On our first night in her hometown, we dressed up and drove to the “Halfway House,” halfway between Worland and Thermopolis, for three inch steaks and, even though we were all just 18, because her parents had called ahead with permission, for one Sloe Gin Fizz or Tom Collins each.
The next morning, we awoke with aching heads and fuzzy tongues to the smell of coffee–Pat’s mother at the kitchen table pouring a cup for each of us, refilling her own mug, refilling the pot with water and more coffee and setting it back on the burner to perk.
For the four days we were there, the pot was never turned off between the hours of 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., and it was never empty except for the minute between pouring the last cup and filling it up to perk a new one.
We were a caffeine society predating the caffeine craze of the 90’s. The later craze coincided, not coincidentally, with the formation of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and stricter drunk driving laws; but in the 60’s and 70’s, we drank coffee as an antidote to hangovers, not as a replacement!
It was a shared vice for which we could imagine no drawbacks. No calories. No fat. Pretty cheap. Unlike the cigarettes we all lit up to accompany our coffee drinking and talks around the table, there was not the least whisper of any negative effects of coffee. It kept us awake during studying for finals and during long nighttime drives between towns in Dakota and Wyoming and helped us wash down our NoDoz. (more caffeine!)
It would be thirty-five years in our future before we turned from those endless cups of hot java sipped from between swirling curtains of cigarette smoke. Driven by morning coughs, short breath and nagging doctors and kids, we would give up first the cigarettes, then, encouraged by aching joints, insomnia or too many trips to the bathroom, we would give up the coffee.
But still, the biting smell of coffee brewing in a pot or urn conjures up memories of Mack’s cafe, where endless chipped white mugs of coffee marked our maturity from preteens to adults. Those first 100 cups choked down while holding our breaths had inured us–initiated us–led to our addiction to and lust for caffeine–until we loved the acrid taste. Black. No sugar. Aspartame was just a future gleam in some chemist’s eye and no one had heard of latte, mocha, jamocha or espresso. No one had ever heard the word cappuccino except in an occasional spelling bee where it was misspelled along with the rest of the obscure words. Although everyone drank coffee, no one had yet iced it, foamed it or whip creamed it. No one had thought to float chocolate curls or cinnamon in it. We just drank it, like truckers, black–from the ever-plenteous pot.
This is a reblog of a piece from four years ago.
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/07/friday-rdp-coffee/
Earthlings
Children love to play in it,
while miners spend their day in it.
We grow our food and build each home
in our planet’s dark rich loam.
If we are wise, we choose to mentor it,
lest too soon we’re called to enter it.
The prompt word for the dVerse Poets Quadrille challenge was “earth.” The only rule for a quadrille is that it must be exactly 44 words long, not counting the title.
I missed out on the date to publish this for the dVerse topic of punctuation, so here it is, tardy as usual!
(for this poem to work, you have to pronounce the name of each punctuation mark that is talked about as a punctuation mark and not merely in use functionally.)
Unruly Punctuation
When a guy driving a GMC
swoops into line in front of me
and takes the place I meant to park,
I use an !
While the ,’s made for multi-tasking,
in a sentence meant for asking,
there has to be a ?
lest readers be left in the dark.
An ! is fine
when simply put at end-of-line,
but, too many (quite a fault of mine)
bring out the punctuation narcs
to ban those !!!!!!!!!!
Those abounding in . . .
are labeled punctuation gypsies
because they don’t know when to stop.
So please call in a grammar cop.
I must admit that I am rash
and tend to overuse the —.
What’s more, my editor goes crazy
when I forget or just get lazy.
His eyes bug out, his face goes red
when I make use of – instead.
The . is the simplest mark.
At sentence end it’s meant to park.
It’s always put where it is best
to let the sentence come to rest,
and no one puts it elsewhere lest
the reader is put to the test
to search from clause to clause to clause
to figure out where he can pause.
When I think of rhymes for ,
only strange words like pajama
are what come to mind—or llama—
or words not to the point, like “mama;”
so I’ll just say the Oxford ,
is like the Tea Party to Obama.
If his (and my) advice is heeded,
it will be clear that they’re not needed!!!
The purpose of the ’
is as clear as it can be:
Judy’s car or Judy’s house,
Judy’s dog or Judy’s spouse.
Yet, when the pronoun enters in,
it is the biggest grammar sin
to use apostrophes for possession
(although I’ll make this hard confession
that often I, unthinkingly,
will write it’s where it never fits.)
It’s in possession should be its!)
“It’s” only used as a contraction.
(It’s a faction, but not it’s faction.)
I think I may conduct a poll on
: versus ;
Which one separates two clauses,
signaling those longer pauses;
and which one signifies a list?
I’m sure that you have got the gist
of which is which—where each should go
to end this punctuation woe.
( ) mark an aside, much as a—might do,
Like “ ”, they’re paired. You always must use two.
Which brings us to the – that joins a compound word.
You never put a space in. To do so is absurd.
You should not use it as a dash with spaces on each side.
That is an antique usage that I simply can’t abide.
Yet if you choose to Google some of the rules here,
there will be discrepancies from site to site, I fear.
What I say they’ll question. They’ll support what I must pan.
So I can only say that I’ve accomplished what I can.
In spite of all my studying, despite my dedication—
I find that few agree on rules applied to punctuation!!!!
