Tag Archives: FOWC

Visiting Grandma

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Visiting Grandma

If you must go on an escapade, be sure to take umbrellas.
Do not talk to strangers and do not flirt with fellas.
Why put on all that makeup? Your natural look is best.
Why would you wear a bustier when you could wear a vest?

Pick locales you know are safe. Just go to ones near churches.
Beware of stuff that falls from planes and pigeons on tall perches.
You may think your gallivanting is the stuff of dreams,
but the world of adventure is not all that it seems.

Why not choose daylight hours to see what you can see
and once the sun sets, stay at home, here with gramps and me?
I’ll make a pan of fudge and then we can play Parcheesi.
This town’s not nice at night. It’s very dark and way too breezy.

But if you simply must go out, mind the bottom stair.
Is that funny little outfit the one you’re going to wear?
Put toilet paper on the seat when you use the loo!
A key? Oh, you won’t need one.  We’ll be waiting up for you.

Prompt words today are umbrella, escapade, dream, locale and natural.

Attitude

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Attitude

Memory can be a juggernaut, retelling us too often
of hard past events that time should be allowed to soften.
What good is it to resurrect mistakes and acts of folly?
Better to forget times gone and make the present jolly.

Our only security lies soundly in the present.
Why waste our thoughts on bygone days instead of days more pleasant?
Trade former tears for whoops of joy and for the umpteenth time,
remind yourself you have the choice to make your world sublime.

Words for the day are whoops, juggernaut,  umpteen and security

 

merciless, indestructible and unstoppable.

Kleptoparasitic Tendencies

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Kleptoparasitic Tendencies

At first sight of the sperm whales, the fishermen all cringe,
for these felons of the ocean loiter on the fringe,
and when they hear the motors hauling in  the lines,
each poacher dives to steal the fish, hook after hook, and dines.
The perils of the ocean include gale-force wind and rain,
but this larceny of sperm whales is the larger pain.

 

To see sperm whales targeting fishing boats for an easy meal, go HERE.

Prompt words for the day are fringe, rain, first, felon and fish.

The Archbishop Gets Forgetful

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The Archbishop Gets Forgetful

Priests in town know when the archbishop is about,
he’s bound to have a new batch of indulgences to tout.
And though he’s their head honcho so they must all be respectful,
when they see him coming they get super-genuflectful.
“Please dear Lord, don’t make us sell the pardons that he has!”
These days that sort of fund-raising carries no pizazz.
Paying their bills as he suggests has no appeal at all.
They’d really rather make do with St. Vincent de Paul.
Yet no one wants to tell him that selling the way to heaven
was outlawed by the church way back in fifteen sixty-seven!

Prompt words for today are honcho, pizzazz, respectful, tout and bill.

 

If Things Should Return to Normal

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If Things Should Return to Normal

Just in case the world we know ever returns to normal,
I feel we’ll need reminders for behavior less informal.
So, let me reacquaint you with the former art of dressing.
Introducing color-matching, underwear and pressing.
It’s been a number of months now—five, to be precise—
since there was the necessity to put on something nice
and face the maze of traffic to go to an event.
So before you visit places where you once often went,
you may require reminders, lest in trips to spots exalted
you could find your entry may otherwise be halted.
Entrance to most restaurants requires shirt and shoes,
along with all your other clothes. Forget this, and you’ll lose
precious hours driving home to remedy the fact
that you’ve forgotten basics of how you used to act.
Out there in the real world, genteel folks do not dare
to go about half-dressed and it’s good to cut your hair.
Put on a little lipstick and tweeze hairs from your chin.
Do not gobble down your food and do not slurp your gin.
When the world returns to normal and you go out once more,
just in case, please pin this little check-list to your door.
Though reminders may be premature, be glad that you have gotten them,
for by the time they’re needed, I’ll most likely have forgotten them.

Prompt words today are maze, precious, introducing, exalt and dress.

Who Needs an Election?

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Who Needs an Election?

Our perfunctory president is not in any hurry
to pack his suitcase.  He’s a rat that’s unequipped to scurry.
Unready to give up his throne., he thinks we are in need
of his gross incompetence, his racism and greed.
How could his teeming vassals unseat their liege-lord now?
How dare his noble lackeys desert their sacred cow?
Are they in their right minds, seeking to end his power?
Must he desert his White House and make do with his tower?

His orange countenance grows pale. His comb-over descends.
He thought that he would rule our world ’til he was in Depends!
If he could only change the rules, how great that it would be
to play his “Trump,” enabling him to found a dynasty.
First Junior, then Ivanka could inherit his domain.
What other tyrant is equipped to take over his reign?
This liberty these fools taut can’t hold a candle to him.
His light is needed now the torch of liberty’s gone dim.

No need for an election. The world’s too dire for that.
He’ll gladly serve another term growing sleek and fat.
He’ll sack Social Security and supplement the riches
of all the moneyed classes. Never mind the foreign bitches
who have swarmed into the congress. Send those tawny women home—
the sacred halls of governance better suit a gnome
who carries golf clubs as his scepters and overlooks derision
to fuck the whole damn world according to his crazy vision.

“Heil Trump,”  his swastika’d supporters chant. “And damn the Jews!”
“Crucify the liberals,” is shouted from the pews
of those for whom religion is being blindly led,
forsaking what is written in favor of what’s said.
As lambs led to the slaughter, let us bleat and blindly scamper
after all the rich men that we were born to pamper.
We do not need good health care, let alone good food or shelter.
Long Live Trump! Who cares if the whole world goes “Helter Skelter?”

 

Prompt words are unready, perfunctory, racism,  scurry and suitcase. Image  from Unsplash, used with permission.

 

Rain

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Rain

I am simpatico with sight, enamored of my hearing,
and yet when both give signs of the rainy season nearing,
I find a new sense opening as the memory
of that long redolence of rain comes flooding back to me.

That first whiff of petrichor—-the breath of dust and rain
brings a reunion of senses swirling back again.
The touch of rain along my arms, the taste upon my tongue.
The song of it in ditches when I was very young.

Every sight excited now as it was then.
First its gentle pattering, then its thundering din.
It beats upon my windows, streams down from the eaves.
Soaks into the soil, forms droplets on the leaves

as though they are mementos of the thunder and the light
that has served as a foreshadowing of the rainstorm’s might.
Every sense appealed to. Riches above reason.
Every prayer is answered in the rainy season.


Words for the day are breath, simpatico, sight, redolence and long. Image of the boots from Rupert Britton on Unsplash, used with permission. All other images by Judy Dykstra-Brown.

Snapped

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Snapped

My nails are often inky or besmirched by dirt or paint.
Perfect rounded ovals are often what they ain’t.
You can always ascertain what project I’ve at hand,
be it cooking, painting or digging in the land,
simply by observing the shape my nails are in:
paint bespeckled, ringed with dirt, ragged, chipped and thin.

There’s usually no saving them. I use each as a tool.
When I trim the pergola or scrape mold from the pool,
my nails bear the brunt of it. They are no pretty sight.
There is no manicure on earth that could put them right.
So a month or two ago, imagine my surprise
when ten perfect white-edged nails appeared before my eyes.

I located the orange stick, the cuticles to shape.
I rounded off the tips of them and couldn’t help but gape
at hands equipped with fingernails for once all the same length!
I admit it. I admired them—their whiteness, shape and strength. 
I decided I would polish them. The first time in a year.
First a coat of fleshy peach, and then a coat of clear.

Finally, all the nails except just one were done.
I saved it for the last because it was my favorite one.
It had the nicest shape of all, in fact it was the longest.
According to my reasoning, it was likely the strongest.
So imagine my displeasure. Try to feel my sense of loss
when I reached out for the nail polish and broke it clean across!

Cruel fate has ways of testing our will and sanity,
sometimes by means of toying with our silly vanity.

 

Prompts for the day are fingernail, pergola, inky, ascertain and savings.

 

Ennui

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Photo by Shane-Ha7FZYLEmA on Unsplash. Used with permission.

Ennui

If she weren’t so frangible, she would be independent.
Her causes would be epic and her actions more resplendent.
She could get more exercise and wouldn’t be so stout.
She’d be so much more sprightly if she could go out.
Her initial actions if she weren’t so fragile
would be acts of daring so spellbindingly agile
that the world would view her as a wonder. Oh, if only,
perhaps then she wouldn’t be so weary and so lonely.

Words for the day are stout, epic, initial, frangible and independent. Photo by Shane-Ha7FZYLEmA on Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

Lazy Day Resolution

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Lazy Day Resolution

I do not want to write a thing. I don’t want to design.
When it comes to creativity, I’m ready to resign.
My efficacy’s at an end. I have no further drive.
No further motivation to prove that I’m alive.

I’m going to eat chocolates in front of the TV.
No schedules to live up to. Now all my time is free.
I have no excuses. Your aid is not required.
To end this conversation, I will just say I’m retired!

 

Prompt words today are design, aid, conversation, efficacy and excuses.