Tag Archives: Humor

Romancing the Word

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The Prompt: Oil, Meet Water—Of the people who are close to you, who is the person most unlike you? What makes it possible for you to get along?

Romancing the Word

Scrabble, Dice and Mexican Train—
I play them once and then again,
while he won’t play a single game
of any sort or any name.

I like to travel. He sits at home.
Walmart’s as far as he will roam.
Won’t go to movie theaters, clubs,
exhibitions, galleries, pubs,

museums, fiestas, meetings, for
such crowding makes him hit the door.
Tourist attractions leave him numb
and make him wonder why he’s come.

I fill my house with Mexican art
that drains my purse but fills my heart,
but my artful clutter makes him frown.
His décor? Purely hand-me-down.

I like people. He sits alone.
His desk chair is his chosen throne
where he supervises the internet—
the biggest nerd you’ve ever met.

I dance whenever I’ve the chance,
but you might have guessed—he doesn’t dance!
He’s six-foot-two. I’m five-foot-six.
Yet tall and short just seem to mix.

I know our friends and family
find us an anomaly.
for these differences are just a start.
We’re 1600 miles apart!

So how can he be my best friend
when our differences never end:
a scorpion talking to a crab,
a Chihuahua running with a Lab?

What makes our congress less absurd?
We’re both addicted to the written word!
We both love puns and definition.
Apostrophe errors? Pure sedition!

While other folks discuss Obama,
we dissect uses of the comma.
We discuss dashes from en to em,
and how the world misuses them!

Splitting hairs but not infinitives,
sound editing advice he gives
for everything I write online.
If words were grapes, he’d strip the vine

of sour grapes and slugs and weeds
and after he had done these deeds,
the wine would pour more sweet and rare,
culled out by his loving care.

And so it goes here on my blog.
In its machine he is a cog—
mending lost links and feeling free
to cut that spare apostrophe.

To wrestle errant prepositions,
question faulty suppositions,
to polish off each word writ wrong
until a ditty becomes a song.

We meet each day on the cyber page
that is the parchment of our age.
While you meet others of your type
at coffee bars, we meet on Skype.

Our discourse clever, funny, rare.
We do not pine and ache and stare
eye-to-eye hour after hour.
For us, it’s words that carry power.

(Here) is another response to this prompt that I loved! It is by Sam Rappaz.  Check her out!

Sticking to the Text

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The Prompt: Bad Signal—Someone’s left you a voicemail message, but all you can make out are the last words: “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you months ago. Bye.” Who is it from, and what is this about?

“Corpus linguistics reflects the shift in academic focus from the brain
to the text as the appropriate source of information.”

Sticking to the Text

Mister tall, dark and handsome has left me in the lurch,
standing at the altar in my little hometown church.
My friends are all around me and my niece clutches her flowers.
The guests have entered all their pews ‘neath ribbon-bedecked bowers.
My bridesmaids stand around me in their pastel-colored gowns,
My father close beside me, all their faces swathed in frowns.

I have my cellphone with me in a special little pocket
sewn into my wedding dress beneath my granny’s locket.
It buzzes reassuringly. I know it is my love.
I fumble as I strip my hand of bracelet and of glove.
I reach into my bodice and switch my cellphone on.
I notice that my mother is looking sort of wan.

I ask at once if it’s my groom and if he will soon come.
“The guests are restless, dear, I say, and father’s looking glum.”
But it is not my true love talking. Rather, it’s his brother.
(The one I’ve always loved the most, though I would wed another.)
He voice-texts me he’s sorry, but I’m making a mistake.
His brother’s a philanderer, a scoundrel and a rake

who really loves another­—a lowlife moll named Ruth.
He says he’s tied him up for now ‘til I can hear the truth.
Their plans are just to bilk me, to steal my money and
make off with it together once he has claimed my hand.
He’s so sad he has to relate this, he tells me with a sigh.
“I should have told you months ago,” he adds, and then says, “Bye.”

The guests sit in stunned silence, for they’ve all overheard.
I hear a mourning dove call out—a most appropriate bird.
My father begins sputtering. My mom says not a word.
My bridesmaids begin fluttering. The day has turned absurd!
I hit “reply” upon my phone and hear it dial him.
It rings and rings and with each one, this day becomes more grim.

But finally he answers and I ask one question of him.
I ask him what his motives were and tell him that I love him!
He answers that he loves me, too, but never guessed the truth.
To take away his brother’s girl just seemed to him uncouth.
But now that he’d found out their plan, he couldn’t let me wed him.
He couldn’t stand to see me say my vows to him and bed him!

I asked him where he was just as he walked right up the aisle.
And love suffused my body to replace the shame and bile.
It mattered not a whit to me my groom had found another,
for I found a happier ending when I hitched up with his brother!
I’ll just let your imagination guess what happened next.
Just let me say I’ve always preferred sticking to the text!

 

Fast Change

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The Prompt: Let It Be—A restaurant that removed your favorite item from the menu, a bad cover of a great song… Write a post about something that should’ve been left untouched, but wasn’t. Why was the original better?

Fast Change

This modern world has changed and changed
until I have become estranged.
These alterations make me dizzy.
I do not like my world so busy.

The young are used to change, it’s true.
They love the instant and the new.
Texts and sound bites come so fast.
Nothing’s really built to last.

But, for someone over fifty,
all this change is hardly nifty.
When at each end the candle’s burned,
when everything we’ve newly learned,

when everything that we hold dear
turns obsolete within one year,
we’re always slightly out of gear,
which makes us feel unjustly queer.

They make these changes without a clue.
Let’s start out minor, then work up to
the major things they’ve set askew:
(I will not mention Dr. Who.)

Every computer becomes its clone.
I cannot use the telephone.
My applications change so quick
that I have come to feel I’m thick.

Skype makes its changes overnight.
(Yet rarely ever improves the site.)
Microsoft Word just loves to change,
which leaves her users feeling strange.

Move this to there and that down here;
so all my mental powers, I fear,
are spent in figuring out the APP
and organizing a mental map

of how to write instead of what,
creating one big mental glut.
No room for creativity.
No safe place where our minds soar free.

We’re always “searching” for, instead,
our minds caught up in fear and dread
of where they’ve moved the enlarge bar to
in this week’s Word processing zoo!

Our e-mail servers have joined the plot.
I feel like pitching out the lot.
Just when I’ve learned most every trick
of tool and contact, every lick—

their Machiavellian, evil team
goes and changes the whole darn scheme!
But when we’re sending coast-to-coastal,
the alternative is going postal.

So though we bitch and though we frown,
they are the only game in town;
and so they have us where they want us.
Though they frustrate, ire and daunt us,

one after another, they are the same,
playing at this modern game
of change for change’s sake, it’s true.
There’s really nothing much to do.

So I submit, though in a tizzy,
I’ll relax less and keep real busy.
I’ll leave the cyber world alone
and concentrate on just one bone

I have to pick in this modern world,
and I say this with my top lip curled.
Max Factor, Revlon, Almay, please—
I kneel before you on my knees.

Leave the lipstick colors that we hold dear
alone! Don’t change them every year.
Each time you cancel one that’s zesty,
to find another makes us testy!!!

Finally, A Voice!!!—A Letter from Two Bad (Misunderstood) Dogs

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Today they chose my suggestion for the daily prompt! It was: Return Address—Yesterday, your pet/baby/inanimate object could read your post. Today, they can write back (thanks for the suggestion, lifelessons!). Write a post from their point of view (or just pick any non-verbal creature/object).

If you’d like to see the letter the below post answers, please go here.

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Finally, A Voice!!
(A Letter from Two Bad (Misunderstood) Dogs)

Do you think it’s simple, giving voice to our demands
without the proper vocal chords, without your human hands?
Everytime we try to talk, you scold us and you hush us,
even though you’ve just admitted that our howls are luscious.

And lacking proper fingers, we cannot write you letters.
We aren’t given proper tools to address our “betters.”
Simply howls and growls and barks and waggings of the tail—
and yet you do not take the time to learn this doggy Braille!

If you’d listen closer, perhaps you’d understand us.
Instead you shout out, “Stop!” and “Hush!” and seek to countermand us.
Can’t you understand that we’re protecting you from prowlers?
Feral cats and owls and skunks and nearby canine howlers?

We have such curiosity, though you determine to balk us.
We wouldn’t have to rush the gate if you’d take time to walk us!
We have to climb up on the roof to get a worldly view.
We wouldn’t be there barking if you’d take us out with you!

As for the cat food, take a clue. The reason we adore it
Is ‘cause it’s smelly, wet and luscious. Dog food? We abhor it!
That cat leaves a bit to tempt us—it’s a cruel feline game!
So why not buy us cat food? It costs you just the same.

And now the final agony. The ultimate tragic hitch,
Not only can our mom not cook, but now we make her itch!
No wonder our neuroses include jostling for attention.
A mother who can’t touch us? This escaped your earlier mention.

We thought you didn’t like us so we tried to win your favor.
Your touch is what we long for even more than cat food’s savor.
And as for pooping in the yard, you never told us to
sneak behind the garden shed to have our little poo.

You seem to think we know these things, but where would we have learned?
It’s you who should have taught us, for obedience must be earned.
If you would spend more time with us, perhaps you’d finally see
there is no other creature with whom we would rather be.

An Ode to Dog Companions

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The Prompt: Literate for a Day—Someone or something you can’t communicate with through writing  can understand every single word you write today, for one day only. What do you tell them?

An Ode to Dog Companions

Darling little Frida, dearest Diego, too.
I have a little something I have to say to you.
If you’d like to go out walking every single day,
you have to start responding when I shout out, “Hey!”

That word means “Pay attention!” Its volume says “Right now!”
It doesn’t mean to take off after every passing cow
pulling me right after you, cause it is two to one,
and since my last foot surgery, I don’t much like to run!

Another little something I’d really like to tell
is that it was all your fault the last time that I fell.
When one of you runs toward the lake, the other towards the town,
your leashes wrap around me and the way I go is down!

Please don’t jump up on the screen whenever mealtime’s near.
I’ve had it mended more than once—a dozen times, I fear.
If you sit there quietly, your meal will be served fast.
I tell this to you each day, but my words don’t seem to last.

Another little something that needs badly to be said
is that it would be lovely if you’d shit behind the shed
instead of on the footpath or all over the grass,
for pooping over everything is really rather crass.

You don’t have to answer that dog across the street,
for he sets a barking record that you don’t have to beat.
The fighting cocks can crow without your high accompaniment.
(Albeit that your howls are growing quite magnificent.)

The hound of the Baskervilles was acting on a curse
and now that you have matched him, there’s no need to rehearse.
The owl will hoot hoot every night no matter what you do.
Ignore him, please. This is your mother begging it of you!

The dog food is for you dogs, and the cat food is for cats.
If you keep forgetting this, it’s going to drive me bats!
It does no good to try to knock cat dishes from the wall.
Those antics will not ever get you anywhere at all!

Diego, when I get home, please don’t drive Frida away!
You won’t believe there’s love enough, no matter what I say.
I have one hand for each of you, so let her have her share.
You are a dog and not a pig, so gluttony’s not fair.

Please don’t eat the cat bed and please don’t chase the cat.
Bullying’s not an answer. I will have none of that!
You found me on the street and did all that you could do
to make me bring you home with me to join my motley crew.

I am allergic to you dogs, and also to each cat,
although I know that you cannot be cognizant of that.
And so you want to sleep real near and have me stroke you often.
But when I do, it ends in itching, nose-blowing and coughin’.

Your species is a puzzle to which I don’t have a key.
Though it was at your insistence that I brought you home with me,
why is it every single time an open gate you see,
you’re through it, running down the street, so anxious to be free?

(for a similar prose answer to this prompt, go Here)

Less Salt in My Success Story, Please

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“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”
–Truman Capote

Less Salt in my Success Story, Please

Is it coincidence that spice is also known as “seasoning?”
The reason for this must be (according to my reasoning)
because we need a bit of this and then a bit of that
lest our cuisine, and more importantly, our lives become too flat.
Summer, winter, spring and fall—no season dominates them all.
So this is why, then, in my view,
a pinch of failure will surely do.

The Prompt: The Spice of Success—if “failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor” (Truman Capote), how spicy do you like your success stories?

Okay, trying to link to NaBloPoMo.  Let’s hope this works!!!

The Daily Wait

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For some reason, I woke up at 4:30 this morning.  Of course I knew there would be no prompt yet, but as I combed the internet for distraction, tried in vain to write to my own topic, joined NaNoWriMo and tried without success to find a photo for a cover and gave up, (who picks a cover before they write the novel?), tried to find the real website for NaBloWriMo and gave up (only to see,eventally, that they posted it with the prompt this morning).

I finally was reminded of the days I’ve sat for hours waiting for the prompt or have received a timely one only to find the link doesn’t work.  And so those other days of waiting are what inspired the seemingly unreasonable post below.  (Who for God’s sake expects a prompt at 4:30 in the morning?)  Daily Post, we do appreciate your efforts so hope you can have a sense of humor about our complaints.  One thought, though. I just discovered the feature where you can set a post to automatically publish at a certain time in the future.  Could you do this with the prompt so it would consistently be published at a certain time?

The Daily Wait

7:05, and still I wait.
Have you forgotten we have a date?
Without your promise, I might move on,
but in your game, I’m just a pawn.
You move me here and move me there.
You do not even seem to care
that I’m here online, held at the brink
as I wait for prompt or wait for link.
Daily Post, you’ve drawn us in,
addictive now as heroin.
We can’t get on with our day
until you tell us what to say!
Your hook and line is without bait,
yet still we let you seal our fate.
If you’d just post your topics sooner,
we wouldn’t have to pull a nooner!

Okay, fair is fair, so here is the real prompt for today and I promise to write about it as well:

The Prompt: The Spice of Success—if “failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor” (Truman Capote), how spicy do you like your success stories?  (My answer to this is now posted in a different post.)

cees-odd-ball-photo-challenge-week-36/

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Odd Ball Snaps.  This is a varied bunch this week..Mostly of folks who are odd balls themselves.  My favorite sort of people!!!!

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Silly Girl

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Silly Duck

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Silly Man

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More Silly Girl

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Bi-Polar Friends on Dia de los Muertos

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Silly Calaveras

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Tumbled Sweetie

HALLOW E’EN

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The Prompt: Trick or Trick—It’s Halloween, & you just ran out of candy. If the neighborhood kids (or anyone else, really) were to truly scare you, what trick would they have to subject you to?

Hallow E’en

They pound upon my door and wait outside my wall.
One climbs a tree to peer within. I hope he doesn’t fall.
I cower here within my house. Perhaps they’ll go away.
Though I am not religious, eventually I pray.

Their little voices raise a pitch. They start to bay and howl.
There’s a flutter in my heart region, a clutching in my bowel.
I purchased Reese’s Pieces and miniature Kit Kats
just for all these masked and costumed little brats.

My motives were unselfish. The candy was for them,
for I don’t eat much candy in efforts to grow slim.
And yet that bag of Reese’s, those small Kit Kats and such
called to me from where they were sequestered in my hutch.

It started with a whisper, hissing out their wish:
“We would look so pretty laid out on a dish!”
I knew that they were evil. I knew it was a trap.
I tried hard to resist them, my hands clenched in my lap.

I turned up my computer, listening to “The Voice.”
Those candy bars would not be seen till Halloween—my choice!
My willpower was solid. No candy ruled me.
(If that were true, no kids would now be climbing up my tree.)

Yes, it is true I weakened. I listened to their nags.
I took the candy from the shelf and opened up the bags.
Their wrappers looked so pretty put out for display
in one big bowl so colorful, lying this-a-way

and that-a-way, all mixed and jumbled up together.
No danger of their melting in this cooler weather.
I put them on the table, then put them on a shelf,
so I would not be tempted to have one for myself.

When people came to visit, I put them by my bed.
Lest they misunderstand and eat them all instead.
Then when I was sleeping, one tumbled off the top.
I heard it landing with a rustle and a little “plop.”

I opened up one eye and saw it lying there
just one inch from where I lay, tangled in my hair.
Its wrapper was so pretty—foiled and multi-hued.
Some evil force took over as I opened it and chewed!

This started a small avalanche of wrappers on the floor
as I ripped & stuffed & chewed & swallowed more & more & more!
This story is not pretty but has to be confessed.
My only explanation is that I was possessed.

They pound upon my door and wait outside my wall,
but I have no candy for them. No treat for them at all.
Surrounded by the wrappers, bare bowl upon my lap,
I think I’ll just ignore them and take a little nap.

I hear them spilling o’er my wall and dropping down inside.
I try to think of what to do. Consider suicide.
They’re coming in to get me. Beating down my door.
They are intent on blood-letting—the Devil’s evil spore.

I guess it’s not the worst death a gal could ever get.
I’ve heard of much worse endings than death by chocolate!

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Midnight Light

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Midnight Light

I wear darkness like a second skin.
It is the cloak that hides my midnight sin
as I make my way, barefooted, through my house.
Silent, lest I wake my dogs or spouse.

This way I know most well and so I bridge
in seconds that long gap between my bed and fridge.
Pull open that snug door and hear the plop
first of the rubber gasket, then the top

of the carton that has been my goal.
Spoon out its richness without benefit of bowl.
This darkness both of me and of the night
something the fridge dispenses with its light

as tears of joy and guilt and pleasure stream
down cheeks distended with this chocolate dream.
For minutes, I stand caught up in the hold
of this trio of pleasures: chocolate, creaminess and cold.

Until some motion jolts me from their grip.
I feel its pressure at my shoulder and my hip.
My spouse rolls over, shattering my dream
of midnight tryst with frozen cream.

Its chocolate savor is one that I try to keep
as I roll over once again to seek my sleep.
Whatever course my next dream serves, I’ll try it.
For I’ve already been one long day on this diet!

The Prompt: Trio No. 3—Today you can write about anything, in whatever genre or form, but your post must mention a dark night, your fridge, and tears (of joy or sadness; your call).