“J”abbertalky
Judy Jamison just jabbed Joe’s jingling jodhpurs.
“Jeez!” Joe jumped jerkily—justifiably jittery.
“Just joking, Jumpin’ Joe!” joyful Judy jabbered jejunely.
Joe’s justifiable joyless judgment jarred Judy’s jubilation.
Joyful June joint juggling junket journey just jinxed!
Jumpin’ jiminy—justifiably, jetlagged Joe just jettisoned Judy!
A Quadrille is a 44 word poem. The prompt for the Quadrille Challenge on dVerse Poets is “jabber.” Image by Zyana on Unsplash.
I must take umbrage over those words
that you have shared with all the world.
My deepest secrets, revealed, I thought, to you alone––
lie here, their magic lost,
trapped in tabloids––worthless
except as wraps for fish and chips.
A Cherita, for dVerse Poets Thanks to Matthew Reyes for use of his image on unsplash and to Forgottenman for his additional prompt “umbrage.”
See other poems for this prompt HERE.
Forest Shadows
A man is bending his wife—
melding their shadows with the green forest.
They do not listen
to the nearby cannon’s roar––
will not imagine
that their life together,
so new,
might
not
stretch
into
the
future.
When he looks at his pocket watch,
someday children
ringing a well-stocked table
vanish in
her imagination.
He lifts his musket to his shoulder,
trying to believe
in a future
and in it,
this memory:
two shadows
joined as one,
invisible against
the forest wall.
For dVerse Poets, the prompt is “Forest”. If you’d like to participate, go HERE.
(And yes, if you were wondering, the skull is actually part of the helmet of a man driving by on his motorcycle!)
Canción de México
(Song of Mexico)
This small café sits on the square,
or rather the rectangle.
The gas trucks pass by, blaring “Gaaaaas,”
their grounding chains a-jangle.
Trucks and cycles lacking mufflers roar by every minute,
accompanied by the beat of bass drums
pouring out the windows of the passing cars,
drowning out the music they were meant to accent.
The guinea fowl make such a ruckus that they sound insane,
but to complain about the noise in Mexico’s inane.
The daily garbage trucks, the water truck and all the rest
all live by the assurance that what’s loudest is the best.
I drink my coffee, eat my muffin, try to grin and bear it;
but when she sets a napkin down, I grab at it and tear it.
And even though one part of me says that I shouldn’t dare it,
I use a bit to wipe my lips. The other part? I wear it!
I stuff a wad in either ear, and though I still hear all,
I go by the illusion that I hear it from afar.
Sometimes I feel the threat of age, so quickly it is nearing;
but if I lose one faculty, dear God, please make it hearing!
This song is in jest, for in truth, I love Mexico, even her sounds, for in spite of this poem, not all of them are loud. Go HERE to read another piece about the music of Mexico.
The prompt for dVerse Poets was to write a poem about music that is meaningful to me. Go HERE to read poems others wrote to this prompt.
Brooch and pins by Judy Dykstra-Brown
Chewing the Train
A metaphor is a freight train
that gets us within 30 miles
of our final destination,
but we still have to catch a taxi to get all the way there.
And a simile is just a metaphor whose brakes have failed.
If we know that peanut butter
is like a circus on a tired tongue,
does it bring us any closer to the smell of peanut butter?
Elephants and sawdust
and sequined camisoles flavored
with the sweat of 100 performances?
Is that what peanut butter smells like?
Does it taste like candy apples
and too-bitter mustard
on stale buns
and hot dogs turned too long
upon the rollers of their grill?
Does peanut butter feel
like the unoiled bump of the Ferris wheel?
Does it sound like a calliope
or look like an ice cream cone?
Peanut butter is peanut butter.
I rest my case.
So how am I going to write a poem
without metaphors and similes?
How can I write verse
while telling the pure unadulterated truth?
How can I make you taste a poem
that is only itself?
How can I be Janis Joplin
when I’ve been taught to be Joni Mitchell?
A Rose is a Rose is a Rose,
said Gertrude Stein,
predating my insight
by a generation or two.
But this isn’t Paris,
and folks in Mexico
want a dollop of figurative language
in their poetry.
So let me say
that my mind is a busy beaver,
trying to fulfill this impossible task
of twenty little things.
I’m expected to imagine
how peanut butter sounds.
The sucking gumbo sound
of South Dakota mud
or thick mucus of a cold?
Anything but appetizing.
Ay, Caramba! you might say,
but if you were Australian,
you would say, “Don’t come the raw prawn on me, mate,”
and you would mean
“Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes,”
or “Don’t try to con me, man.”
So let me just say that peanut butter is made
by grinding peanuts so finely
that all the oil comes out
and it acquires the consistency of butter.
It isn’t like butter
nor is it butter.
It acquires the consistency of butter.
This is literal fact.
But to know the taste of peanut butter,
you will need to spread a bit upon a cracker
and have a taste, or grab a finger full.
What you will taste will be peanut butter.
The truth of it. Its reality.
And only then will I tell you
that literal truth doesn’t always tell
the whole truth.
My friend says
it is the peyote leached into the soil
the corn grows from
that gives Mexicans
such a remarkable sense of color.
The bright pigments of imagination
flood his canvasses.
His peyote dreams leak out into the real world
and wed it to create one world.
“Peyote dream” becomes its opposite—
a freight train taking us into the universal truth.
A larger reality.
This stalk of corn, this deer,
this head of amaranth,
all beckon, “Climb aboard.”
So when you bite into a taco
or tamale, when the round taste of corn
meets your tongue, and pleasure tries to flow
like a lumpy river down your throat,
look up at the poet standing in the shadows.
She’ll call herself by my name if you ask,
but do not ask. Instead, look deeper
into the shadows she wears around her like a cloak
and see that it is light that creates shadow.
See the many colors that create the black.
Follow where the corn beckons you to go––
into the other world of poetry and paint
and dance and music. Hot jazz with a mariachi beat.
Chew that train that takes you deeper. Hop aboard
the tamale express and you will ride into your
new life. It will be like your old life magnified
and lit by multicolored lights and the songs of merry-go-rounds
and when you bite into your taco, it will taste
like cotton candy and a snow cone
and your whole life afterwards will be a train that takes you nowhere
except back into yourself—a Ferris wheel
spinning you up to your heights and down again, with every turn,
the gears creaking “Que le vaya bien.”
I hope it goes well with you
and that you see the light
within the shadow
and the colors
in the corn.
For dVerse Poets synesthesia poem. You’l have to sift through this poem for the synesthesia, but I promise you , it is there.
Broken Concentration
The words packed tight within my mind
seek the empty page.
They fly like hummingbirds and hawks
escaping from their cage.
But when all my empty places
I seek to fill again,
too many words rush in at once,
creating such a din
that nothing can be made of them.
I cannot restore order
in these alien syllables
that flood across my border.
I did not think these previous lines.
They just crept up on me.
I place words here upon the page
and thereby set them free.
They have no place within my head
where I had plans to write
a solitary love poem.
Instead, they spar and fight,
one trying to beat the others
to the front line of my mind.
Love words elbowing their way,
lined up in back of “pined.”
So “heartsick” steps on “passion’s” toes.
“Adore” runs out of steam
trying to reclaim the place
where words like it must dream.
I no longer know the purpose
that I set out upon
I fear the mood is broken,
my concentration gone.
The thought that any love poem
will come is now absurd.
Minutes ago I was in love,
but now I have been cured!!
The dVerse Poets prompt is “broken.” We have broken vows, broken systems, broken expectations, broken agreements, broken communication, broken societies. Especially right now in this world, many of us know “broken”. Will we be able to repair the divisions? Can we put the pieces back together? Can we recreate a better world?
Now and Then
In cracking the present to reveal the past,
it shimmers, triumphant, expansively vast.
I tend to remember the moments most happy—
successful and positive, silly and sappy,
but when I remember it using a filter,
it leans to one side, completely off-kilter.
The same number of memories from days gone by
if remembered at all, are recalled with a sigh.
I reach into my heart and remember again
the more negative moments of days that have been.
Then I quiver with passions, now full of dejection
of the defeats and failures––the pains of rejection.
It’s the way of the world to give us one day
what in the future it will take away,
but nonetheless, we must live for the present
and accept all it offers—both painful and pleasant.
When we pin all our thoughts on past sadness or fun,
We fasten ourselves to a life that’s undone.
The dVerse Poets prompt is to write on triumph and/or defeat. Or perhaps the thin line between them.
Old for New
Goodbye Old Paint
What have you eaten that we have forgotten?
What lost earring resides
in the deepest recesses of your front seat?
What coins shaken and pushed into your crevasses?
And do you remember the song made up on the spot
and sung just once, then left forgotten in Nevada?
Do you still carry the dust of Tonopah
or that yearning to actually see something extraterrestrial
on the Extraterrestrial Highway?
Do you carry shards of his boredom while driving
mile after mile of Utah beauty?
Do you still carry her expectations
of sharing the giant faces of Rushmore
and echoes of the fact that he expected more?
What of molecules of the Mississippi crossing
or dreams of the memories of Hannibal?
What sweat from those Mississippi hours
waiting outside the B.B. King Museum?
Salt grains and crumbs of chocolate
and DNA of those few souls who rode along in you—
all parked in a parking lot waiting to be bought
by someone who will never know the hidden you.
Just like the rest of the world,
frequented by interlopers.
Only we, leaving you, will murmur “Goodbye Old Paint”
and know that although you neither hear nor answer,
somehow our past is locked up inside of you
and there a part of us will stay
while we depart without it.
The dVerse Poetics Challenge is: to write a poem that conjures a view (whether from your travels or everyday life, whether from desire or experience) that is colored by the emotion of the moment. This poem was originally written in answer to This blog by Forgottenman. I had totally forgotten it, but when it popped up in another context today, it just seemed to meet this prompt so well that I had to repeat it.
Another lost heart and someone in the background who looks like she could have been its model. SCULPTURE BY ISIDRO XILONZÓCHITL.
EMPTY HEARTED
All those long years ago, it was you who begged me to give you a chance to prove how much you loved me. In the end, I did, opening my heart against the advice of everyone we knew. And when I surrendered that very last part of it, opening myself fully, you proved them right and left. For fifty long years, I have been feeling the lack of your love. “Find someone else to give your heart to–someone worthier than him,” my family and friends have been insisting all that time. But I have no heart to give. When you took back your heart, you took my heart with it. To hurt is to steal.
The dVerse Poets prompt was to write a piece of flash fiction or other prose up of up to or exactly 144 words, including the line “to hurt is to steal” from the song “Mysterious Ways” on U2’s studio album Achtung Baby.
Go HERE to see flash prosery written by others to this prompt.
The dVerse Poets prompt is to write a poem in response to the Picasso painting above.
Beach Memoirs
That good old salty sea air combined with grainy sand
defined my beach vacation and went great with being tanned.
Felt great under my bare feet and squished between each toe.
And left footprints behind me, wherever I chose to go.
It crusted up my toenails and powdered all my floors.
Seeped into my keyboard and creaked up all my doors.
It maintained a constand presence once I got back home.
It sneaked into my ear canals and caked up brush and comb.
In spite of all the nuisance of the sand within my bed,
good memories of beach life still swirl within my head.
Yet I needn’t wax nostalgic, for I find behind each knee,
in pockets, luggage and the floor—the beach came home with me!
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 