Tag Archives: OctPoWriMo

Patterns of Light

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Yes, a candle has a tail, too.
Twilight

Click on photos to enlarge.

Patterns of Light

Time devours candles as twilight dines on day.
There is no way to change this, for it is nature’s way.
Vivid colors fade to night, alleviating need
to be about day’s business and to bring the rest we need.
But this change of light to dark another change is spawning.
Black turns to grey and grey to blue in a new day’s dawning.

 

 

 

Word prompts today are grey turns to blue,alleviate,vivid,, devour,  business and candles.

Garden Gnomes and Other Decorating Blunders

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Garden Gnomes and Other Decorating Blunders

My taste in decoration eschews cute and adorable.
Cutesy hearts and  animals—designs I find deplorable.
When I choose to accentuate, fantasy is out.
It’s simply an esthetic that I choose to flout.
Whimsy in embellishment is not a problem for me.
It’s only sticky sweet that will irritate and bore me.
So keep your big-eyed children, your fairy, elf and gnome.
Their plaster effigies will never decorate my home.
My garden will not sport them. My butterflies are real.
Garden gnomes are merely things for passers-by to steal.

Photo by Sarah Brink on Unsplash,Used with permission. Prompt words today are fantasy, accentuate, elect, eschew, taste and decoration.

Overextended

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Click on photos to enlarge.

Overextended

I’m swamped with obligations, let alone what I like doing.
If it were Halloween, I would have no time for booing.
Gargoyles in the garden would have no satisfaction.
They could haunt me all they want, but they’d get no reaction.
I don’t have time for feeling, for music or for fun
until all of the tasks I face are finally through and done.
I can’t finagle time to merely mess around,
for I fear it is my habitude to be completely bound
by my check-lists and my calendar, and no, I don’t know why.
It’s simply in my nature to do and do or die!

 

A “friend” once told me with great irritatIon, “If you’re going to do all these things, Judy, just do them, but don’t for God’s sake talk about it!” I fear I’ve broken her injunction, finally, after all these years. This poem is tongue-in-cheek. All things I enjoy doing…but I do know how to make a mess.

Prompt words today are swamp, finagle, gargoyle, habitude, feel and music.

One No Trump

17 Replies

One No Trump

It seems that any smartie would
have questions of the hardihood
of one who can’t control his urges,
but opens mouth and simply purges!
It’s anything but recondite
that he is less than erudite.

He stammers and he mispronounces
as he proudly mis-announces
facts and figures he’s invented,
letting out hot air that’s pented
up inside his roiling brain.
The scuttlebutt? This man’s insane!

For the present, we’re stuck with him,
but (we hope) his future’s grim.
In the future, perhaps a cell—
a domain that would suit him well.
No more oval office for
this vain and posturing dimwit bore!

If they ever choose to make
a movie of this shyster flake,
casting’s bound to be a bummer—
choosing between “Dumb” and “Dumber.”
Which will most aptly replicate
our soon-to-be ex “Fool of State?”

Prompt words for today are hardihood, scuttlebutt, urges, recondite,  the present and movie.

Do

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Do

This is the perfect climate. Now is the perfect time
to do all that you can to make your world sublime.
No more empty promises. No rain checks or excuses.
No masking of reality to obscure your abuses.
Look back in your history to see the full extent
of all the possibilities that in the past you meant
to “see about” tomorrow. Then tomorrow never came,
for when it did, it seems that you made it just the same
as the day that came before it, so now you’ll never know
what your life may have turned into if you’d only let it grow.
Relaxation’s fine if it’s used as a reward––
but it should be an end result that we are heading toward.
It cannot replace doing. Doing is what life is for.
Without learning and accomplishing, existence is a bore.

 

Prompt words today are promises, sublime, history, extent, relax and mask. (The captions on the photos below may seem disjointed, but I decided to leave all the captions from earlier times I’ve used these photos. They do, in a disjointed way, create a little story all their own.)

Paint your flower, or if you prefer, paint the strips before you cut them apart. I prefer to do the individual flowers because you don’t have to wait for the paint to dry.
Wonderful art cards made by the kids at LCS
This little girl may be one of the friendliest in camp, at least when it comes to the counselors. She has a hug and a kiss for me every morning and when she leaves in the afternoon.
Fill pan with enchiladas and if you wish, put a narrow stream of sauce down the middle of enchiladas and top with scallions, grated cheddar and black olives.
Young artist
Getting down to business.
Possible addition to the center of the east facing wall. See the blank spot?
Planning

Click on photos to enlarge and read captions.

 

Everything in Everyone

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Everything in Everyone

Wild haunted rhythms sail the night as we lie supine,
thinking thoughts unbidden that are far from the divine.
All Hallows is that time of year that causes us to ponder
all those fearful yearnings that we conceal and launder
as we get through the daylight world, hiding our duress
of all those hidden thoughts and dreams we labor to suppress.
Everything in all of us, to honor or accuse.
And it’s up to each of us what we will pick to use.

Prompt words for today are: divine, ponder, duress, sails, haunted,  wild rhythm.

 

 

A Halloween Bedtime Story

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Click on photos to increase your terror!

A Halloween Bedtime Story

There’s a world that is intangible except at Halloween.
It teems with banshees and with ghosts at other times unseen.
Strange monsters with long fingers and pumpkins for a head
lurk inside your closet, hang out under your bed.

When they finally emerge, it does no good to shout.
They’ll grab you in their mighty grasp and turn you inside out.
Put your arms outside the covers or one foot on the floor,
and you’ll provide a tasty lunch the monsters will adore.

For once they have a single limb securely in their clench,
they’ll have you all in seconds. Your destruction is a cinch!
Though Halloween is much beloved by all you candy lovers,
Once at home and snug in bed, best stay beneath the covers!

Prompt words today are  pumpkin, mighty, intangible, banshee, cinch, inside out.

Memory

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Memory

Life is like a labyrinth. Things may be just fine,
yet we don’t know what awaits us farther down the line.

We can’t discern our futures, so we must enjoy today
so at least we’ll have a past to remember, come what may.

Changes of perspective are bound to come with time.
We may not have the passions that we had in our prime.

We are changeable creatures. So nature has intended.
If we hold onto earlier goals, our lives may get upended.

In times of adversity, we still possess rare treasures.
Our recollections are where we can hoard our former pleasures.

 

Prompt words for today are down the line, adversity, labyrinth, discern, change of perspective and creature.

Cats Trump Dogs: Oct 14, 2020

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Click on photos to enlarge.

Cats Trump Dogs

My dogs are perspicacious with insights most profound.
They’re aware of every flutter, on top of every sound.
Their vigilance professional, with duty it is fraught.
Nary a squirrel has crossed the yard without being caught!

No passerby is overlooked, no lizard, snake or newt.
Their senses are omniscient, their judgments most astute.
They keep my backyard creature-free, pristine for lawn and blossom.
They will not suffer gopher or mole or vole or possum.

Guard duty’s not a hobby. They see it as a task
that they were truly born for. I need not even ask.
The cats they see as horrors—wily and uncouth.
They cannot bear their presence. They see it as the truth

that cats are unorthodox. Not banished to the ground,
they roam the roof and wall and trees, rambling all around.
They tease the dogs from far above, safe from all their fury.
Sauntering off slowly, for they aren’t in any hurry.

Prompt words for the day are professional, unorthodox, hobby, perspicacious, truth and horror.

Foxes Under Moonlight

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Foxes Under Moonlight

The phantasms rise in tandem as they seep out of their boxes
to caress the bats and tantalize the foxes
by swooping through their caves and pulling at their tails.
Of all the foxes’ problems, they cause the most travails.

On Halloween they haunt the world, including you and me,
but in the interim, they aren’t allowed to wander free.
They’re restricted to the meadows, the byways and those places
where they are not likely to encounter human faces.

Phantasms are not cordial. They harry and they tease.
They seep into the smallest crack and travel on the breeze.
They stir up other spirits and agitate the fleas,
causing havoc everywhere and doing what they please.

So though they might harass your world every Halloween,
and though they might be spine-tingling and horrible and mean,
it is the one night of the year they leave the foxes be,
so the foxes are beholding to the likes of you and me.

If you should dare to wander through the forest and the trees
on this All-Saints evening, get down on your knees
and peer into the burrow of the soundly sleeping foxes
curled up in a ball with their noses near their soxes.

See them sleeping soundly, undisturbed within their dreams—
twitching in contentment under the moon’s full beams?
Your one night of terror is the fox’s only break.
Be grateful for your haunting, if just for the foxes’ sake!

Word prompts today are interim, cordial, phantasm, tandem, outside the box and dusk. Ghosts may take it easier on foxes on Prince Edward Island, as is evidenced by this fox that I observed spending a good half hour or so basking in the sun of the yard of my friends Dianne and Andy. Or perhaps it was the sunlight that drove the phantasms away. Or our presence.