Tag Archives: #FOWC

Making Hay

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Making Hay

Take dinner at your leisure but with breakfast please make haste
lest one minute of your day you should think to waste.

Contemplate your choices. Delegate with care.
Of capricious working mates, I warn you to beware.

If you nurse idle habits, they’re sure to grow and thrive,
so don’t rest on your laurels while you are still alive.

Life is given as a gift so please don’t abuse it.
What a waste of riches if you choose not to use it.

Prompt words today are breakfast,  capricious, haste,  delegate and nurse. If you don’t understand the  allusion in the title, go HERE for enlightenment. Photo by Niklas Hamann on Unsplash. Used with permission.

Birthday Heist

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Birthday Heist

The rumors are untrue. He is a scurrilous liar.
I did not steal the birthday cake. I did not start the fire.

My serenity is not a ruse. I’m innocent of error.
I swear I had no hand in your recent birthday terror.

The dog has done his utmost to brand me as the thief,
but the fool is barely lucid. Could you not see his relief

when you started to upbraid me as he chased me, headed south,
crumbs falling from his chest hair, frosting around his mouth?

Oh that I knew your language and I could tell you that,
but instead, for ever after, you’ll be blaming “that damn cat!!”

Evidence of an earlier crime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvtfDaBi8XE

Prompt words today are liars, lucid, scurrilous, utmost and serenity.

What Man Hath Put Asunder

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What Man Hath Put Asunder

The venerable queen of the whole Pacific Ocean
sat upon her Mermaid Throne toying with the notion
that the creatures of her realm should make an application
to create an underwater independent nation

to make their world more stable, in short to try to foil
those who drilled into its depths, searching for more oil
with which to poison both the world above and here below.
Already, she had seen them disturb the status quo

and flood her realm with poison thick and inky black,
destroying things that afterwards they had not put back.
Those creatures of the middle world between the sea and air
thought they were entitled to all that flourished there.

What nature had reined in they nonetheless felt they could alter,
wild horses freed from stables without benefit of halter
or reins or any saddle with which they could control
the forces that once gone unleashed began to take their toll:

gases leaking into air, oil inking up the water,
ice caps at Poles North and South beginning to totter.
There seemed to be no help for it, for humans seemed inept
at maintaining order in a world so loosely kept.

And so the seabirds washed ashore and the dolphins perished
because creatures of the middle world had not maintained and cherished
 that miraculous balance which nature had established
and were loath to change their course ’til all of it had vanished,

thus wiping out all humankind so Nature could start over
reinventing sea creatures, then blossoms, bees and clover
that those feckless humans had sought to kill in vain,
as this time she’d leave humans out of Nature’s chain.

Prompt words today are venerable, mermaid, application, entitle and stable. Gas, help and ink are the words for the TTC challenge #608. Photo of oil slick by Daniel Olah on Unsplash.

Ascension Dementia.

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Ascension Dementia

When it comes to penthouse parties, I’m an equivocator
if it is a building that lacks an elevator.
Lately, my flair for climbing stairs seems to be out of whack.
When it comes to floor ascension, I do not have the knack.

My gumption seems to flag a bit as I reach the brink,
for as I run short of breath, I simply cannot think.
Thus, I’m an oxymoron, for when I climb the stair,
my mental acuity simply isn’t there.

At the bottom I am boisterous and have a lot of pep
that vanishes too quickly as I take step after step.
I try to remember what I climbed nine stories for,
but I can’t for the life of me remember anymore.

 

(According to poetic lexicography, an oxymoron is someone who loses mental acuity due to oxygen loss to the brain.)

Prompts today are flag,  gumption, oxymoron, whack and boisterous.

 

Sad Movies

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Sad Movies

This movie’s so sad it should come with a tissue
and  a spare one as well with the first one they issue.
I blush to admit how my tears are just gushing. 
I’m surrounded by neighbors complaining and shushing.
It’s uncanny that I’d pay good money for this.
Nine dollars for me and nine dollars for sis.
I don’t need the mood swing. I don’t need this sadness—
exchanging for tears my earlier gladness.
If they’re going  to produce such sad entertainment,
a least they could provide adequate containment
for all of the tears and the blowing of noses.
Entertainment this year was no bed of roses!

Prompt words today are swing, uncanny, blush, issue and spare.

Last Ride

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Last Ride

He was a motorcycle zealot,
so when his wife said he should sell it,
he protested, “It’s too soon!”
and headed out under the moon
in zipped-up jacket and leather boot
for a ride along that route

he’d ridden in his glory days,
but this time it was in a haze.
Those gorgeous hills and dales he’d ridden
somehow now seemed to be hidden,
rivaled by McDonald’s and
Target and Computerland.

Gone all the open road that he
had ridden when he’d felt so free.
His buddies ’round him in a pack—
Rowdy Bill and Badass Jack.
That place where they had raised such Hell
now turned into a Taco Bell.

He turned his bike back homeward then,
back to his place in Shady Glen.
Tacked a sign that said “For Sale” 
over his bike next to the rail
whereupon he hung his youth,
wild and free and so uncouth:

his leather jacket, his buckled boots
his companions down so many routes.
Hills and valleys away from home
where in wild youth, he’d gone to roam.
Finally knowing those days were done
now that he was ninety-one.

Prompts today are soon, zealot, gorgeous, rival.

Vivid Mexico

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Vivid Mexico

Those individuals who choose to spend the remaining years of their life south of the border have some strengths in common. Some come because it is a cheaper place to live, but those who remain generally stay because of a love of the richness of the life here. It is an existence not free of snafus—a life not for the lackadaisical or the personality set in its ways. There are fewer safeguards and rules–fewer antimacassars to protect chair backs from oily heads. Fewer lifeguards to warn someone they are too far out in the water.

If one falls into a hole where the manhole cover has been left off and sues for damages, the judge is more likely to enquire if they were blind and then to dismiss the claim. You couldn’t see the cover was gone and walk in a different place? It is a place of accountability for one’s own actions, creating less of a propensity to blame problems on someone else. Mexico is not perfect, but it is perfectly beautiful and varied and life-filled. If one wants to cram a lot of life into their last twenty to forty years, it is one of the places  where it is possible to do so.

Prompt words today are antimacassar, lackadaisical, snafu, water. In addition, Pensivity’s “Three Things Challenge” prompt words are individual, strong and border.

Fresh Resolution

Fresh Resolution

I’m not in possession. I’m off of the bottle.
My recovery is going full throttle.
I’ll be home every night in time for my supper.
Not a reefer in sight, nor a downer or upper.

What lies beneath my new resolution,
my seeking forgiveness and absolution,
is simply a need to set myself right.
I’m tired of the subterfuge every night.

I’m tired of hearing pleas to desist.
Tired of struggling just to exist.
So I’ll be your lover if you’ll be my baby.
For the rest of my life I’ll go straight again—maybe.

Prompt words today are bottle, upper, twist, beneath and possession. Image by Michael Longmire on Unsplash, used with permission.

Agates

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Agates

Often, when our hired hand took a break from work,
he’d comb the land for agates, then return with a smirk,
pockets full of shiny stones he’d removed from the clay,
bragging to my father that this was his lucky day.

Down along the river, on sunny days they shone,
mixed in with the detritus of  rocks and sand and bone.
You’d have thought that they were diamonds he’d removed from the earth,
but he didn’t judge their beauty simply by their worth.

He had learned to capture happiness anywhere he found it,
sorting out the beauty from what he found around it.
A simple man, for him it was not something he could buy.
He found beauty in a blade of grass or clouds up in the sky.

Lucky man, therefore he found beauty everywhere—
In his wife’s shy smile and his children’s flaxen hair,
wheat fields spread like blankets before the combine’s blade,
he gloried in all the riches that the earth had made.

 

Prompt words today are agate, smirk, remove, often and land. Image from USGS on Unsplash, used with permission.

 

Mergers and Acquisitions

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Mergers and Acquisitions

Their marriage was nefarious for its machinations,
for it was less love story than it was amalgamations:
wedding of fluid assets, portfolio combining,
mid-cap stocks and pipelines, oil shares and mining.

Their merger started out with a proposal to borrow—
an essay for a loan that somehow upon the morrow
turned into a merger that wed family and family
to create a union that was more of an anomaly

than it was a love story—a joining of two powers 
that should have woven dollar signs into the wedding bowers.
Thus is a son or daughter turned into corporate pawn
as simply as a corporate schemata is redrawn.

 

Prompt words today are fluid, nefarious, borrow, amalgamate and essay.