Tag Archives: #FOWC

Imitating Grandma

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Imitating Grandma

In my grandma’s pleasant house,
dressed up in her peasant blouse,
a towel stuffed in to form a lump
to imitate her dorsal hump,
I tried to imitate her waddle
and her propensity to dawdle,
offering morsels from her cookie jar,
as she watched me from afar.

With not a filament of shame,
I went about my childish game,
beaming as I played the gimp,
miming her arthritic  limp.
In my innocent portrayal
was the cruelest betrayal.
The family knew the shame was mine,
but as I toddled down the line

of people who filled up the room,
I gloried to the cheerful boom
of Grandma’s laugh as she piped up
to save this youngest clueless pup
from the shame I might have felt
if she had not approached and knelt
down next to me, gathering in
this cruel mime, absolving sin.

And though I thought the final line
would surely be a quip of mine,
aping her halting foreign speech
as I tried to avoid her reach,
she gathered me in loving hug
and giving an indulgent shrug,
said, “Forgive her, for she’s only three
and gets her sense of humor from me!”

 

Prompts today are dawdle, (love that word) mine, peasant, filament, morsel, beaming and portrayal. Image from the internet.

Something Fishy

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Something Fishy

Those who embrace fish cuisine need to heed my warning,
for even though a new catch comes in every single morning,
our local seafood retailer it’s rumored is a mobster
who concocts a fishy mishmash and pawns it off as lobster.
It’s mushier than lobster and they say a wee bit pallid,
so if you want the real deal, better stick with tuna salad.

Prompt words today are lobster, embrace, concoct, retailer, tuna salad.

Chasm

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Chasm

I flounce, you plod. You reach the crest
while I have chosen to stop and rest.

From far below, I scan the skies.
dreaming, as you supervise.

You are inflexible and frigid,
I the opposite of rigid.

As I wander here and there,
you search for me and tear your hair.

What tantrums over my transgressions
must be prompted by my digressions.

Comparable to day and night,
you are the darkness to my light.

This, dear, is the dichotomy—
the chasm between you and me.

 

Prompts for today are flounce, crest, supervise, comparable, tantrum, inflexible and dichotomy. Image from Unsplash.

Sea Shanty

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Sea Shanty

We dined upon quahaug clams, oysters and shrimp,
but the sauce tasted funny, the lettuce was limp,
and an onerous numbness in our lips and our legs
immediately suggested we’d been served the dregs
of a past morning’s catch, so we rued our selection
and sought out a mole to back up our detection
of who had slipped up and served us bad shellfish.
What entrepreneur was so greedy and selfish

that he’d risk our lives simply for filthy lucre?
We appealed to the waiters to provide some succor
and spurred on by our pleas and sizable tips,
they gave us proof that our angry sore lips
were the product of clams a few days past their prime,
so we sued that rude restauranteur for his crime.

He was found guilty and is now in the cooler
where if he’d been smarter and a little less crueler,
our clams would have been in the days before serving.
And we all agree no convict’s more deserving 
of a stay in the hoosegow, and because of our plight,
when we’re in a mood to go out for a bite,
we skip all the seafood joints, pass them right by
and go out for a burger or a nice meat pie.

 

prompt words are slip, selection, mole, dregs, quahaug, immediately and onerous. Image by Louis Hansel on Unsplash.

New Words Coined or Words Remembered?

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New Words Coined or Words Remembered?

To *neotorize a new word when you can’t find a rhyme
is not really playing fair, in fact it is a crime.
Surely any writer who is worth her salt
is expected to have words enough stored in her mental vault

so no errant *wyvern can abscond with them,
and fly them off to some tall tree, where, perched upon a limb,
he’ll breath fire, thus reducing all the words to ash,
dispensing all their fragments with a tremendous lash

of tail as he flies off again in a hunt bicoastal,
for words shared by any means: books, magazines or postal.
No honeyed tongue can save them once charred and ground to dust,
but still all words that they contained should be recalled and must

once more be written down so those words purloined and embered
by the next generation can be read and thus remembered.
No need to coin new words to express those thoughts once thought.
Better to recall the ones poets of old have wrought.

Hard enough to put them in the rows they once assumed.
Half the work is over once the old words are exhumed.
Why go to twice the work when half the work will do?
And best that once restored, you hide them from the wyvern’s view!!!!

 

*to neotorize is to coin new words, terms or expressions.
*a wyvern is a legendary creature with a dragon’s head and wings, a reptilian body.

Prompt words today are ash, abscond, expect, *neotorize, honey, *wyvern and  coastal

Shelled Sanctity

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Shelled Sanctity

This retreat for turtles in the mountains of Nepal
has the godliest turtles on our Earthly spinning ball.

See the holiest of holies in their tiny saffron robes,
doing daily meditations by pushing tiny globes

first eastward and then westward with a pointed beak,
defining piety by actions instead of how they speak.

See lurking in the shadows, a million tiny ants,
bending low to watch their passing, those tiny sycophants—

who profess to kiss the ground that the turtles walk upon,
but instead just make use of the paths they’ve made when they are gone.

Busy small collectors, they build layer upon layer
of food to nourish bodies, but murmur not a prayer

in thanks for what they’re given, for they know right well
proper thanks is being given by the Brothers of the Shell.

 

Prompts today are lurking, define, saffron, satirical, godliest, turtles and sycophant.

Rudely Interrupted

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Rudely Interrupted

Notwithstanding what the newspapers say, I am not capricious.
I merely have a questioning eye that’s oftentimes suspicious.

I found the blade and saw the blood and what I had surveyed
I felt was information that must be conveyed.

It’s true the entire police force was at once deployed
and also true the mayor was excessively annoyed 

that it was his summer barbecue  that was rudely stormed.
by the selfsame vice squad that he had lately formed.

Only to have them tell him when he did his yearly preps
for his fabled pig roast on his own front steps,

he should remove the grisly evidence lest neighbors be alarmed
that it might have been a human being that was harmed.

The mayor, truly irked at the action he’d incited,
resumed his annual picnic and I was not invited!!!

 

Prompts today are capricious, blade, survey, deploy, questioner, newspaper and notwithstanding. If you want to play along, the links to the prompt sites are under the prompt words. Image by Hassan Rafhaan on Unsplash.

Resolution

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Resolution

She refused to remain the underdog, tethered to her stanchion.
She’d trade her present hovel for a stately mansion.
She’d update all her fashions and tone her waist and thighs,
exercise with vigor to decrease her zaftig size.
She’d become more vivacious, more up on all the news.
She’d practice stealth and cunning in interpreting the clues
of what it took to rise up in the elite scene,
responsive to what it might take to be a social queen.
But alas, it never happened, for to her great sorrow,
she kept putting self-improvement off until tomorrow.

Prompt words today are mansion, update, responsive, stealth,  vivacious and underdog.

Isosceles

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Isosceles

A silly argument at best,
and yet it would not come to rest.
They simply could not seem to cease
their debate on “isosceles.”
They could not bring to a fruition
discussion on its definition.

He said the answer had to be
that the triangle had three
even sides, while she said two,
and they wondered what to do
to resolve their worrisome plight
and  determine who was right.

In every other prior fight,
there was a book to set them right,
yet while spring cleaning, they’d packed up
every book and dish and cup
to maintain their purity
with absolute surety.

But both of them thought it was ruthless
to remain unschooled and truthless
on this subject math-related
they so hotly had debated.
So in the end, they thought they must
unpack the boxes and chance the dust.

They placed the boxes around the border
in some semblance of neat order,
opening one, then two and three
to try to solve the mystery,
kneeling there on bended knee
to try to find some verity.

When finally they found the truth,
to be two sides, ’twas sad, foresooth,
that in the end, they found the fight
still had not been set to right,
for neither would admit to be
the one who had insisted three!

Prompt words today are wonder, prior, cleaning, semblance, isosceles, argument and purity.

Why I Can’t Do The Prompts Today

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Why I Can’t Do The Prompts Today

I think I’ll be a morning grouch
and spend these hours on the couch
making lists of things for doing—
certain things that involve gluing,
cleaning, sorting, chopping, timing—
things that do not involve rhyming.

A sea of things I’ve been concealing,
chores that stack up to the ceiling,
divert me from acts of creation
with chores of limitless cessation.
Hobbies I’d rather pursue
put off by what I’ve gotta do.

Pay my house fees, cook the stew,
trim the bushes, find the glue
to fix the statue, sort my purse,
clean out the junk drawer, then rehearse
my poems for next Friday’s reading.
Fix my blouse. Restore its beading.

Answer emails, call the plumber.
Modern life is such a bummer.
Sometimes I think I exist
solely to check off a list.
At any rate, as I have ranted,
other parts of me recanted.

It seems I’m such a winsome elf
that this poem just wrote itself!!!!!!

Prompts today are winsome, sea, certain, list, grouch, hobby and concealing.