Tag Archives: FOWC

Cat and Mouse

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Cat and Mouse

My cat is feeling obdurate and that is no surprise.
I see it in extended claws. I see it in his eyes.
His back is hunched into an arc. His hair all stands on end.
His lips are stretched back in a hiss, his teeth ready to rend.

When he lets go a loud remark, it sounds more like a chatter.
I look up from my magazine to see what is the matter.
The prism on the windowsill reflects a flashing gleam
and he springs into action to try to catch its beam.

Like an arrow, straight and sure, he shoots across the room,
but when he does, his target’s gone. Vanished in the gloom.
It seems his prey has vanished. It’s nowhere to be found.
He’s wasted all his energy: his speed, his stealth, his bound.

The cat door closes with a swish. He’s off to other pleasures.
Out in the sultry cloud-swathed world, he’ll resort to other measures.
He saunters by the hen house, hungry, but it’s no use
He still bears the scars of the rooster’s last abuse.

While the men are busy milking, he’ll crouch there in the dirt
hoping if he’s lucky to receive a friendly squirt.
He’ll troll the barn for mice and rats, then comb the prairie grass
for game that’s more digestible than prey that’s made of glass.

Prompt words for today are prism, scream, sultry, obdurate, letting go and cat.

Advice to Myself at 73

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It’s never too late to experience growing pains. If it is our onus in life to grow and to change, with no cutoff point after which we are absolved of this duty, then why are we dumbfounded when those pains of adolescence occur again and again at each stage of life? We perhaps grow more serious over the years, but need we become less sensitized? Does the snub, the willful wounding, the being overlooked, the derision become less important? If so, why? Perhaps it is a mark of self-worth, and that is good, but if it is merely the building of a cocoon around ourselves, except in the direst of circumstances, it becomes more of a punishment than a defense.

We are born into this world to experience and therefore, are given defenses to deal with the negative, but when those defenses grow to isolate us, then they become more than protective blankets. They become walls which become our prisons. We were meant to experience and to be vulnerable to changes. And lest we atrophy, from the cradle to the crematorium, we need to fight to keep ourselves open to those experiences that invite change.

 

Prompt words for today are: serious, dumbfounded, cremate, onus and growing pains.

Bipartite

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Bipartate

Pelted by the details of the busy world,
I lie within with half of me comfortably furled.
That flawless part that stays within, that flawed part I let out.
Trying to synchronize the two is what life is about.

 

Prompt words today are pelt, synchronize, flawless and bipartite. Also, Shining Your Light. for OctPoWriMo.

Melania’s Revenge

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Teenvogue.com photo
Sun Photo

Teen Vogue and Sun Photos

Melania’s Revenge

As he descends the air stairs, his waving hand waving,
his wife walks beside him as though she is braving
the air that’s around her. She seems to be craving
release from a torment, but she is behaving
because of a settlement scored when he won—
more money for her and more for her son.

But they can’t make her smile a believable smile—
one that masks her boredom and covers her bile.
His hand swatted away, she walks on her own
due to numerous deeds for which he must atone.
The hole in her soul must be so hard to fill,
for living with a jerk is the bitterest pill.

Even she has her pride. It’s an act of sedition
expressing her angst for four years of perdition—
a vehement act that expresses her pride
that though docile outside, she’s a rebel inside.
Some say she’s a dreamer, as though in the dreaming
she escapes a life over which she’d be screaming

if she really cared —but she doesn’t, you know.
If it weren’t for the valium and all of that dough—
she’d no doubt go crazy. Stark raving mad,
over having to spend her whole life with this cad,
but the latest new fashions and a life on the lazy
make up for a husband certifiably crazy!

And as for the people who make her life hell?
She’ll just crook her pinkie and ring her small bell
and tell them to rip out the damnable roses
and then flaunt her power in all of their noses,
by creating a garden—a dull boring park
that will prove that Melania’s at last left her mark.

courtesy #Getty and @marycjordan

Prompt words today are hole, vehement, wave, sedition and dreamer.

Fruitless Interrogation

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Fuitless Interrogation

When they lampooned the bully, he nearly slipped a gasket.
They had made his effigy and put it in a casket.
When he finds out exactly who engineered this jaunt,
He’ll know whose school locker that he’ll have to haunt
to find retribution—to torture and harass.
When he finds out who did it, he’ll surely have their ass!
But when it comes to sleuthery, he’s not doing so well.
The entire school was in on it. Nobody’s going to tell!

Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash. Used with permission. Prompt words today are bully, lampoon, jaunt and basket.

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

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flying-heart

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

If you want my love, dear, you’ve got to give me space.
Love’s so much more likely when not always face-to-face.
Even the paranormal works better when the fright
occurs when not expected instead of every night.

That familiarity breeds contempt is not, dear, mere codswallop!
Love is more exciting when taken as a dollop.
How many great love stories were romantic interlude—
those long-remembered periods when we were briefly wooed?

Love can be a lifelong trip or one terrific bash
where two bodies crash together and then burn away to ash.
The bodies that are left to us may then be wooed and married,
the memory of past flaming passions sealed away and buried.

But in a vault within us, those past interludes are kept,
and now and then the present they are bound to intercept.
They do not rival constancy—that lasting love or marriage
that is the coach that carries us. They’re just the undercarriage.

But that daily diet that regularly nourishes
cannot but be improved upon with a few spicy flourishes.
Like an appetite that grows the stronger with the fasting,
love delayed may well make even married love more lasting.

 

Just for the fun of it this time, I decided to look up one prompt word at a time and write a couplet that contained it before looking up the next word, then do the same each time. So much fun. I always say I rarely know where a poem is going until I finish it, but this time is the proof of it! I didn’t know from couplet to couplet where it was going.

Sam found THIS POEM that bears a remarkable resemblance to the poem above. I guess when I start repeating myself, it is time to stop. I had no memory of writing this poem. Guess it is time to start worrying as well.

Words of the day are space, paranormal, codswallop, interlude and crash.

Fatal Persuasion

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Fatal Persuasion

Don’t ruffle up your pinions as though I’m about to strike.
Although my bite is lethal, I am kind to those I like.
They say in certain circles that I am quite a catch,
and I await you at your doorway. Just open up the latch.

 

 

Word prompts today are catch, pinion, strike,

Celestial Harvest

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jeremy-thomas-E0AHdsENmDg-unsplash

Celestial Harvest

Whenever I see stars, I get these rambling sort of feelings.
My soul soars out to meet them, abandoning its peelings—
my body left behind as though left back in a cave
with stars studding the ceiling—the rest of me not brave
enough to chance the journey away from what I know,
but I release my spirit, hoping it will sow
flowers of remembrance whenever it deems
the time right to come back to plant them in my dreams.

 

HERE is another piece I wrote about star-gazing four years ago. I found it while looking back through past blogs to try to find a photo to illustrate this poem.

Prompt words today are stars, ramble, feeling, antre (cave) and sport. Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash. Used with permission.

Bad Fortune

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Bad Fortune

A superfluous excrescence  to our sinking ship of state,
of all our past mistakes, I’m sorry to relate
that this uquiet jester is our biggest flub to date–
a fact that many voters cottoned onto way too late.
But if you seek a formula for change, there’s no debate.
Vote this fool out of office before he seals our fate!

Prompt words today are quiet, formula, jester, excrescence and past.

 

The Lowest of the Highest by Default

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The Lowest of the Highest by Default

He was a homeless jester, a contentious feisty gent.
He shed a sense of triumph everywhere he went.
No amount of scorn and no superior air
ever contradicted his shabby debonair.
In a stovepipe hat, overalls and a tux jacket,
he played his mobile xylophone, making such a racket
that folks rushed out to pay him just so he would quit.
He felt no sense of shame in this, for he took pride in it.

He had the perfect racket. He felt he counted coup—
raking in the dough for what he didn’t do.
He had a fridge crate penthouse on a tower labeled Trump.
(Also a little pied á terre across town at the dump.)
Highest of the highest and lowest of the low—
his main address  the finest though he had so little dough.
The key up to the rooftop he had scored out of a pocket
right after the janitor had gone up there to lock it.

He snitched a maintenance uniform and in the helter-skelter
of a tenant’s moving day, filched his plywood shelter.
It made a perfect domicile obscured in a back corner.
As a joke, on its front cornice, he wrote, “Residence of Horner.”*
But he dragged it to the rooftop’s front when the day was done
and had a view of city lights that was second to none.
You may think that he’s a shyster and the building’s lowest resident,
but only since the former lowest tenant became president!

 

*Little Jack Horner sat in the corner eating his Xmas pie.
He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum and said, “What a good boy am I!”

Words for the day are homeless, contentious, jester, amount and triumph. Image by Donald Teel on Unsplash, used with permission.