Quelling Rebelling
Rebelliousness is not my choice.
I do not like to raise my voice.
At meetings, if I choose to go,
I like to frequent the back row.
I don’t sit in. I do not picket.
Resistance is a sticky wicket.
Not for me the protest march.
I’m missing nerve. I lack the starch.
So if I choose to be a hellion,
I’ll find a way that’s not rebellion.
The prompt: write a poem that involves rebellion in some way. (This is tongue in cheek. I actually did march in this demonstration.)
The Taste of Love
What we feasted on
in those first stages
of internet romance—
when nine hours was too short a conversation—
was words.
We passed on to the next stage of computer dating:
our first dinner date.
He watched on his desktop computer as I prepared a salad.
This was a long and lengthy process
I recorded as closely as was possible
using the camera from my laptop.
A prisoner of his large unmovable console computer,
I watched his empty desk chair
as he repaired to the kitchen to prepare his meal,
hearing sound effects but little else.
When he returned to the living room and his computer,
he laid his meal in front of his computer.
I had yet to see it as I, in turn, placed my salad in front of me
and took my first bite,
watching closely my technique according to my Skype image.
I chewed politely and then smiled,
revealing the lack of lettuce shards on my front teeth.
I looked up. He was watching me as lovingly as usual.
Now, it was his turn.
What are you eating? I asked.
Ham, he said.
He lifted a huge hunk of ham on his fork, taking a dainty bite
and chewing happily.
What else? I asked?
Just ham, he answered.
And so he demolished the entire pound or two of thick ham steak,
now and then washing it down with a healthy swig of rum and Coke.
Rum and Coke.
It had been one of our bonding experiences
to find that the drink of choice of each was not only rum and Coke,
but Bacardi Rum with Caffeine-Free Diet Coke.
How could this not be a romance made in heaven?
Culinary compatibility,
from 2,000 miles away
seemed to be less of a problem than it would be three months later,
when we first made physical contact.
Well, there was a resolution.
He started munching on carrots
and I had no objection to ham.
We both found a like mania for potato chips,
but true romance bloomed
when I found the full bar of Hershey’s Chocolate
atop his refrigerator.
Who says we need to concentrate on our differences?
Hershey’s Chocolate?
Yes. Our first true taste of love.
NaPoWriMo Prompt for the day: write a paragraph that briefly recounts a story, describes the scene outside your window, or even gives directions from your house to the grocery store. Now try erasing words from this paragraph to create a poem or, alternatively, use the words of your paragraph to build a new poem.
Matins
We lie in each other’s shelter,
hiding what is necessary,
shedding guilt,
holding one another in the soft reverence
of those who seek to be loved.
We can hardly believe
how our pieces are coming together—
the hard world retreating,
falling like pages from our hands,
making us want that loss of everything
except the two of us.
Flattery is unnecessary, as is reassurance.
We hold one another as protection,
quieting each other,
gathering our petty problems
like brood hens put inside for the night,
safe and barely yearning
for the freedom of low branches,
flight to further fence posts and away.
How could we have ever wished escape?
Caught up in our private morning,
we find it hard to remember
what the rest of the world rails against.
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt: find a poem in a book or magazine (ideally one you are not familiar with). Use a piece of paper to cover over everything but the last line. Now write a line of your own that completes the thought of that single line you can see, or otherwise responds to it. Now move your piece of paper up to uncover the second-to-last line of your source poem, and write the second line of your new poem to complete/respond to this second-to-last line. Keep going, uncovering and writing, until you get to the first line of your source poem, which you will complete/respond to as the last line of your new poem. It might not be a finished draft, but hopefully it at least contains the seeds of one.
This is a link to the poem “Hail Mary,” by Megan Blankenship that I chose from “Blackbird” Magazine to use to inspire my poem.
Naughty Boy
Donald met a speed bump. They’ve hung him out to dry.
He can’t understand for he is an upstanding guy.
He’s everybody’s hero. His daughter tells him so.
He has a stunning hairdo. He has plenty of dough.
The charges that they’re making? It’s clear that they’re just jealous.
This is what a POTUS gets who’s handsome, smart and zealous.
He sneaks down the darkened hallway. He knows it’s somewhere here.
He finally finds the kitchen. He knew that he was near.
They’ve locked the fridge and cupboards to protect him from assassins,
but he knows where keys are hidden and how the fridge unfastens.
He creaks the door wide open and sees it on the shelf—
the gallon of fudge ripple just waiting for himself.
He grabs a spoon and shuts the door. He locks it and he’s off,
betrayed by not one footfall, one heavy breath or cough.
He almost makes it back to where he can gorge undetected.
When all at once a flashlight warns he’s soon to be inspected.
It’s not the secret service that has caught him being naughty.
It’s worse! It is Melania standing stern and haughty.
Sheepishly, he takes his ice cream cache back to the kitchen.
A rumbling tummy preferable to her eternal bitchin’.
Tomorrow he’ll slip off to his favorite namesake arches.
Mcmuffins always compensate for midnight thwarted marches.
Three with Sausage, one with bacon should be the proper ration
To fuel this self-proclaimed hero as he messes up the nation.
Melania
The prompt: write a poem in which a villain faces an unfortunate situation, and is revealed to be human (but still evil).
Love the haibun by my friend Dianne. She doesn’t have a blog so wanted to insure this poem got the attention it deserves:
At 2 a.m. this morning son Jacob delivered us from the airport to our dark yard. Grateful to see no snow gleaming in the gloom, we staggered inside, even more grateful for the heat of the kitchen wood stove. Our three day return trip from the sunny hot Pacific coast of Mexico, our 2nd home for seven years, featured a snowstorm hello as our plane broke through the cloud to land in Calgary. While we’re mostly glad to be home on PEI, the sounds of silence are deafening. No morning wake-up calls from chachalachas, lorikeets, and doves. But this afternoon a sound surprised our ears—the wind howling.
Bathing suits blow on
Bare forsythia branches
We await their bloom
A Dreaming Vocabulary
When you’re sleeping soundly in your nightie or pajammers
and you happen to be dreaming of teacups, sharks and hammers,
if the hammer pounds the teacup, spilling tea and cream
to soak the wobbly table that is also in your dream,
you might think good fortune has cruelly run out,
but that still does not explain what the shark’s about.
A dentist in a rowboat comes rowing quickly by.
He fixes that circling shark securely with his eye,
grabs him in a deadlock and pulls him o’er the side,
doses him with novocaine, then just drifts with the tide
as he extracts the teeth that he might use to chew
on anything that he encounters: fish or squid or you!
And just as he is finishing this grisly operation,
the shark begins a session of intense regurgitation.
First a full-grown seagull, then a pink silk ballet slipper
with the ballet dancer still attached, alive but not too chipper.
The shark is still recovering so toothless and so numb it
knows not that if it wants a meal, hereafter, it must gum it.
The whole group now returns to shore. The dancer dances off.
The seagull sits in shock and the shark begins to cough.
A mariachi hits the sand, complete with his guitar.
All of them a bit in shock, wondering where they are.
And to you, caught there in dreamland, what message does this send?
Perhaps, my dear, that everything comes out right in the end!
The Day 14 prompt is: Pick one (or more) of the following words, and write about what it means to dream of these things: Teacup, Hammer, Seagull, Ballet slipper, Shark, Wobbly table, Dentist, Rowboat.
I awaken to the insistent music of the morning. The cacophony of bird voices is disrupted by the squeaking of gears of the gravel truck climbing the mountain road past my house. Steam rises from the hot pool echoing the venting of Colima volcano, peeking over the shoulder of the mountain known as Señor Garcia. He has on his cloud sombrero today, which promises rain.
Crisp air of morning.
Mournful chorus of dog howls
echoes siren’s wail.
The NaPoWriMo prompt today is to write a haibun that takes in the natural landscape of the place you live. The WordPress Daily Prompt is disrupt.
A Letter from My Future Self of 2038
Dear Remi,
Remember eight years ago, when you took this new name for yourself? I notice you’ve slipped back into the “old” name (Judy) and the “old” you that you professed just five years before to no longer identify with. What happened? Was it merely the resistance of old friends to call you by this new name? Or was it that you slowly slipped back into being that person–more laconic, giving in to the heaviness and inactivity of age? Did you also give up on romance and change and the excitement of the possibility of forward progress? Did you decide to stay where it is easier with an established routine, people to clean your house and wash your clothes and mow your grass and clean your pool?
I’m wondering if you are thinking about how that is working out for you. I see you even more tied down than before–five cats instead of one, making plans to start more programs for the young people of your community, but will this be enough? That sense of urgency and of time passing that has kept you vaulting from your bed and running outside to try to breathe at night—is it caused by any physical condition or is it me, prodding you to be young for as long as you can and to experience more before you sink into that routine that is the reward for doing all that you meant to do in this lifetime? Is it time to retire and to smooth your own pathway, or is it still time to leap over barriers such as this barrier of yourself and go boldly out into the world to see what else is there?
I’m not trying to prod or push you or suggest the way. I am, after all, a figment of your imagination as surely as your present view of yourself is. I understand that two foot surgeries in two years slowed you down and changed your exercise patterns as well as the patterns of your day. I also realize that friends moved away or moved into new lives and that this also made you turn inwards. There are reasons of one sort or another for everything we do. We all have excuses. At 90 years old, I have excuses, too. I know where you ended up but I also know that there are a limitless number of me’s.
There is the me that succumbed to Alzheimer’s, as your sister did. There is the me who moved to Italy and moved off into a new life that I only hint at here. There is the me who has devoted herself for the past 20 years to making her small town a better place to grow up in. There is the me who finally took off in that boat and went all the remaining places there were to go. There is the me who grew grumpy and reclusive and eventually became dumber than her Smart TV.
There is even the implausible me who did all the “shoulds” and got her other books published—who maybe even got back on the agent/publisher treadmill and did it the “right” way. There is the me who found more romance, the one who converted her entire house into a dog kennel or cat sanctuary, the one who built the house on the adjoining piece of land and hired a nurse/housekeeper and invited her friends to come grow old with her. There are so many potential me’s that I hope it is making your head swim and that I hope will make you think about what you want to do with the remaining 30 or so years of your life.
Things are not over. In the first thirty years of your life, you grew up, went to summer camp, counseled at summer camp, went to University, sailed around the world on a boat and saw all else that life could be, got your masters degree, emigrated to Australia, taught for two years, traveled for four months through southeast Asia and Africa, moved to Africa and had various adventures, good and bad. Fell in love, taught school in Addis Ababa, moved back to the U.S., taught for 7 more years, fell in love, built a house, edited a creative writing journal for teens, traveled to China and Great Britain and Hawaii.
Then you had a dream that knocked you into a recognition of your subconscious. You quit your job, moved to Orange County, CA, wrote on the beach, moved to L.A., fell in love, studied film production and screenwriting at UCLA, worked in a Hollywood agency, joined a writer’s workshop, joined an actor’s studio, worked for Bob Hope, gave poetry readings, was co-editor of a poetry journal, fell in love again, married, moved to the Santa Cruz mountains, became an artist, traveled and did art and craft shows for 14 years, became the curator of an art center, lost your husband, moved to Mexico, self-published four books, traveled, taught English and art, fell in love a few more times, started a poetry series.
This is what can be done in thirty years. So, what are you going to do with the next thirty?
Love, Remi–twenty years older.
The NaPoWriMo prompt today is: a poem that addresses the future, answering the questions “What does y(our) future provide? What is your future state of mind? If you are a citizen of the “union” that is your body, what is your future “state of the union” address?” This rewrite of a piece written three years ago seems to fill the bill, except it was pointed out to me afterwards that it isn’t a poem! Can I get by saying it is a prose poem? If not, this former piece which is a poem also answers the same prompt: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2018/03/15/provoke/
Simultaneous
Galaxies spin out of sight
far out in this selfsame night
where I attempt to journey in
to universes within my skin.
Whole worlds inside that I can’t know.
I feel sometimes they guide me, though.
How else explain my need to range
into environments more strange.
Like many, thinking I’m unique
when many others who also seek
share a larger journey all,
trapped together on this ball
that spins our world through time and space
taking us all to the same place!
For Napowrimo.
“Ant”cestry.Com
“I think we may be family,” was whispered in his ear,
but he couldn’t see who said it, though he looked both far and near.
Again that small voice spoke to him. “We share a family name,
although as the biggest, you possess most of the fame.”
Thus did the massive elephant notice for the first time
the tiniest of animals who’d finished its long climb
from the dirt so far below up to his mighty ear.
From foot to knee to shoulder, it had climbed in spite of fear
that one great flinch might cast it from the air down to the ground.
Yet still it journeyed upwards, driven to expound
on how great an irony, surely it must be,
that this small “ant” and the eleph”ant” must be family!
NaPoWriMo 2018, Day 9: write a poem in which something big and something small come together.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 