Tag Archives: poem

Quintessential Gentleman

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Quintessential Gentleman

He was the quintessential gentleman with tie correctly knotted.
Whenever he entered a room, the women were besotted.
Every Grande Dame had him on her dining list,
while all their daughters secretly were yearning to be kissed.

Little girls adored him and their mothers preened and fussed.
When they knew he’d be there, even  grandmas showed up trussed.
Artists painted his portrait. Sculptors sculpted his form.
Everywhere he went, slavish attention was the norm.

Every woman on the subway seemed to hope he would accost her,
and every social circle had him topmost on their roster.
All in vain, for every single mother, grandma, sister
was not even in the running, for he preferred a mister.

 

Fandango’s prompt word today is quintessential.

Objectification

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Objectification

Objects are dependable. Objects are the best.
Objects do not leave you. They remain there at rest.
They soothe the eye with beauty or operate as slaves,
for objects have served us since humans lived in caves.
Since the first stone hammer or flint carved to a point,
objects have helped to feed us or to pretty up the joint.
Carved into a cave wall, a bison or a bird.
Art lasts for millennia. That’s why I find absurd
those who say things don’t matter, for what I have to say
is that it’s art that lingers. People just pass away.

 

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Fandango‘s prompt today was object. Before you start exclaiming in protest, I’ll issue the disclaimer that this is written a bit tongue-in-cheek. Albeit, I love art. Wouldn’t want to live without it.  But I do realize people are more important.

Fandango‘s prompt was object.

Flip Flop (for DVerse Poets Pub)

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flip flop

the sound  of ease
and summer

not much to slip into
or out of

sand between toes
and other cracks

released in sleep
to gritty sheets

grinding our sleep
and clogging up washing machines

long gone the days of high button shoes
and the shoe horns that went with them.

Waist cinchers
give way to bikinis

and bikinis
to nude beaches

half of the world
flip flopping

rubber soles
and swinging breasts.

flip flops
taking the place

of gasps
as stays are tightened

the other half
burqas and Jimmy Choo

these differences
in freedom found

and freedom
found too slowly

find release in
collapsing towers

conceal, reveal.
flip flop.

 

For dVerse Poets Pub–on summer.

Black Hole

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R=(2GM)/(c^2)

As we’ve evolved from scales to skin,
growing the body we’re now in,
Did our mind grow here inside?
How did our soul come to abide
secure within this human form?
How did it come to be the norm?
Did words form here in you and me
simply because they yearned to be?
Were they put here to link us to
that in the eternal stew
that unites us all, in our unknowing
to a universal glowing?
And if so, what an irony
as words transform and set us free,
they also split us wide apart––
placing the head before the heart.
Substituting a dollar sign
for solutions that should be divine.
Can this be our ultimate goal,
in our journey toward our own black hole?
To grow our mind and freeze our heart
until it blows us all apart?
As science seeks to understand,
it holds us all within its hand.
It has the means, if it should please,
to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.
I wonder, then, can even a soul
escape the pull of a black hole?

The RDP prompt today is scale.
The Daily Addictions prompt was transform.

Some Little Bug Inside Me

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I am too sick to write a blog, I am a party hangout
for some amoeba who moved in and promptly called his gang out.
They’re having quite a time in there, yet keep wanting to leave.
Each time I have to see them out, I stumble and I weave.
My stomach feels like shattered glass, my head is slightly pounding.
I think they’re doing Zumba—flip-flopping and rebounding
against my corridors of gut. I wish that they would stop.
I can’t make it to the clinic to consult a microbe cop.
Is it a parasite or fluke ( contracted from my cat?)
When she strokes and kisses them, what cat owner thinks of that?
For now, I’m resting in my bed with electrolytes and Flagyl.
I’ve cancelled my appointments, for I’m feeling sort of fragile.
The world will demonstrate without me, and friends go out to dine
while I hang out with tiny guests, miserable and supine.

 

I had this same bug a year ago, when I had to call off my 70th birthday celebration, much-planned for, because I was so miserable. So, these pesky amoebas seem to be maintaining a schedule.  Unfortunately, I had a full day of activities planned today, as well—first of all a demonstration against Trump’s immigration policies, then a visit to my doctor, a visit to an ill friend, and dinner with another friend.  All cancelled.  Ironic that I’m too ill to go see my doctor.  Here’s another little ode to amoebas I wrote during an earlier bout named “Once Upon a Lime in Mexico.”

 

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/06/30/rdp-30-fluke/

 

Ragtag’s prompt today is fluke .

Regeneration

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Regeneration

Hobbling around on the stump of a life,
nobody’s lover and nobody’s wife,
her children and grandchildren all raised and grown,
out of her life and out on their own.

Is her life over? Is it near its ending,
or has she another life that is just pending?
Has she a talent for regeneration?
Is the first sixty years mere education?

A single shoe dropped is only one shoe.
Life isn’t over until it is through.
Perhaps she’s less active removed from the past,
but wind can still fill out a sail at half mast.

The stub of a life can still get us around.
A heart can still beat and the blood can still pound.
Go after adventure for all you are worth,
for every new day is a part of your birth.

The Daily Addictions prompt is generate.

San Miguel Nocturn

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San Miguel Nocturn.

It’s two in the morning.
Dogs call out greetings or warnings,
the near dogs hoarse in their excitement,
the far dogs mellow and rounded
in the echoing distance.

What are they saying?
Bright moon like a bowl,
new bitch in the territory,
a whole leg bone today?

All night long they bark and bay
until 4 am when the first
then the second and the third rooster crows.

Someone throws a handful of grain
and the chickens cluck like popcorn
in a finally hot pan,
waking the city which only
seemed to sleep.

The lobby steward, waiting
for the last guest to enter,
nods at his post,
t.v. static charging the air around him.
The guard by the gate waits
for the honk of a horn.

A woman crouches
over a pad of paper in the bathroom
so as not to awaken her friend.
Her pen scratches as hens  scratch
in the dirt of the yard below her window.
The friend’s almost imperceptible
snores are a counterpoint to the music
of the first cars
accelerating up the cobbled hills.

New sounds build the symphony:
the slam of a car door,
footsteps on the stairs,
water in the pipes.

A city’s wide morning yawns
clash and reverberate
in the  still darkness
as dogs bark like a hammer
pounding repetitiously,
building the new day.

San Miguel de Allende, 2002. Click on any of the last 5 photos to enlarge all.

This old convent, converted into a hotel, is where I have always stayed when I go to San Miguel.  Bob and I stayed there just months before his death. This poem was written a few months later when I revisited our favorite places in San Miguel with a friend. That is what this poem was written. To see the poem that I wrote that night, go HERE.

Preposterous Vision

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“Peyote Dream” Painting by Jesus Lopez Vega

Preposterous Vision

My friend Chuy says
it is peyote leached into the soil
the corn grows from
that gives Mexicans
such a remarkable sense of color.
The bright pigments of imagination
flood his canvasses.
His peyote dreams leak out into the real world
and wed it to create one world.
“Peyote dream” becomes its opposite—
a freight train taking us into the universal truth.
A larger reality.
This stalk of corn, this deer,
this head of amaranth,
all beckon, “Climb aboard.”

So when you bite into a taco
or tamale, when the round taste of corn
meets your tongue, and pleasure flows
in a lumpy river down your throat,
look up at what is standing in the shadows
and see that it is light that creates shadow.
See the many colors that create the black.
Follow where the corn beckons you to go—
into the other world of poetry and paint
and dance and music. Hot jazz with a mariachi beat.

Chew that train that takes you deeper. Hop aboard
the tamale express and you will ride into your
new life. It will be like your old life magnified
and lit by multicolored lights and the songs of merry-go-rounds
and when you bite into your taco, it will taste
like cotton candy and a snow cone
and your whole life afterwards will be a train that takes you nowhere
except back into yourself—a Ferris wheel
spinning you up to your heights and down again, with every turn,
the gears creaking “Que le vaya bien.”
I hope it goes well with you
and that you see the light
within the shadow
and the colors
in the corn.

For Fandango’s prompt: preposterous

Caught Short

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Caught Short

Caught short by the rainy season, I should have known better.
Though I’d left home high and dry, I knew I’d soon be wetter.
Defenseless  in the downpour, I ducked into a store.
Just to get some shelter,  I rushed in through that door.

I felt that I was lucky as this store was full of stuff,
though finding what I needed might be sort of tough.
The store clerk shuffled up to me, though he could barely stand—
an umbrella just as old as him held up in his hand.

Lucky when I chanced upon this ancient wrinkled fella,
he happened to be carrying a really big umbrella!
I opened up my pocket book and located a fiver.
Now I wouldn’t spend this day wet as a scuba diver!

But when I left that thrift store with my practical new find,
I found that I was actually in the same old bind.
For opening up my parasol, I uttered “What the heck?”
as rivulets of water ran down my head and neck.

The purchase I’d just made, I found, would be no help at all.
I hadn’t noticed that the shop was St. Vincent de Paul.*
The fault was no one else’s.  I know it was mine, solely.
I should have realized sooner that my purchase would be holy!

 

*St. Vincent de Paul is a secondhand store run by the Catholic Church.

 

The Daily Addictions prompt was Ancient. This poem was published under a different name four years ago.

First Kiss

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First Kiss

“Allemande left, allemande right.
Promenade your lady, hold her tight!”
Years later, I recall demands
for touching waists and holding hands.
To “Promenade. Go ’round the world.”
We do-si-doed and faced and whirled.
Square-dancing was called to blame
the day I first encountered shame.

Just six years old and mild and meek,
a boy my age dared peck my cheek.
His mother pulled him off the floor,
then jerked him rudely out the door,
shaming him with words and action
before I knew my own reaction,
which might have merely been a measure
of a friendly mutual pleasure.

Instead, for twelve more years together,
held as classmates in close tether,
much as I perhaps desired
that we might have again conspired,
he never tried what once was censured.
Another kiss was never ventured

’til in our twenties, home from college,
emboldened by our further knowledge,
home briefly for summer vacation,
heartened by a small libation,
finding ourselves in darkened car
up on a hill, his mother far
away in town, we finally kissed,
discovering what we had missed.

Then we went our separate ways—
that one night just a summer’s phase.
Years later, though, I still recall.
that first kiss, and his mother’s gall
over what was a gentle theft
prompted by an “Allemande left.”


The “guilty parties” are, it is true, pictured above, but I’m not one to kiss and tell. This true memory was prompted by today’s “Daily Addiction” prompt of promenade.