Delayed Warning
A bout of indigestion can make a guy a grouch
and leave him prone to lying grumbling on the couch
while his wife stands listening, chuckling in the hall,
remembering how she had warned him not to eat it all.
Yet he had ingested it, as usual, in a hurry
before she could warn him that he was eating curry!
For the Three Things Challenge the words are: CHUCKLE GROUCH INDIGESTION
Image by towfiqu-barbhuiya- on Unsplash
Foggybaby Dreams Clarified
(For My Nephews––now Six Feet Tall.)
You flinched from my touch,
hated the red cowboy hats
I bought for you,
preferred the hundred
tiny grass frogs
to the cows we tried
to introduce
into your city lives,
had eyes only for the trucks
carrying salt for the cows
to gather after.
Early mornings,
you leaned against
my sleep.
And oh,
your sleep-wicked
hair
and your
sweet sour milkbreath
and the
slight fart smell
of your warm bunny p.j.’s,
your impeccable smiles.
Daylight
had barely
bedeviled
you yet.
Five minutes until
you melted
back into your
foggy baby dreams,
and I became
your
nostalgia.
For NaPoWriMo 2023, the first prompt is to write a poem inspired by a book cover.
Below is information for the book cover that seemed to best illustrate this poem:
And also for dVerse Poets Open Link Night.
Split Seconds
On Valentine’s Day,
standing dizzy on a dry summer country road,
between weekend dances in different towns,
sweet 16 and finally kissed.
My eccentric English professor,
slapping down his briefcase once, twice, three times
on his table at the front of the room,
opened the clasp, drew out our first papers,
and chose mine as the one to read aloud.
I felt the gun barrel pressed against my head,
heard the gun fire,
fell into the street and rose above
to see them lift his wounded body into a taxi,
my body lying in the street.
The woman in the dream
walked toward me across the barroom,
threw her drink in my face,
then hit me over the head with the glass
and I woke up soaking wet, with a knot on my head,
screaming, “Just wake up!”
I saw him for the first time
on the stage at the little coffee shop in Santa Monica
reading love poems he’d written to another woman,
and it was as though I’d been with him
for my whole life. Then afterwards,
I was with him for the rest of his.
He met me
at the plane
with a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup and a rose.
Hours later, in his kitchen,
after the long ride southward,
luggage spilled sideways on the floor—
another long-delayed
first kiss.
The NaPoWriMo prompt is to “write your own poem that provides five answers to the same question – without ever specifically identifying the question that is being answered.”
Cryogenic Ponderings
I hear that they’re researching cryogenic preservation,
and I admit I view it with a certain hesitation.
I’m drawn to such longevity, but must admit I worry
about what aftereffects such a heedless act might curry.
As wily as I now may be, as cunning and as clever,
will irresistible qualities remain with me forever?
Will I be packed with garlic to keep me fresh and bugless?
Will I still be so sexy after eons going hugless?
Can minds be kept as fresh as flesh? Can kind hearts be conserved?
Can intellect and soul be saved and memory preserved?
What good will body do one in a thousand years or more
if they can not conserve those things we hold here in our core?
Prompt words today are drawn, irresistible, wily, garlic and cryogenic.
Image by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.
Story Time at the Library
Cluster here around me. Cross Your legs. Open your mind.
I’m going to tell you stories of a slightly silly kind.
Or lie back on the carpet, close your eyes and try to see
all the varied images that are going to be.
We’ll be crossing to another land where we can be whatever
each of us may want to be: beautiful, brave or clever.
Light the bulbs above your head. Imagine what you hear.
For the next half hour or so, you’l be “there” and not “here.”
In imagination’s magic land, all your dreams come true.
Climb aboard my story train and I’ll share it with you.
And now as then, the crowd being both clever and magnanimous,
They decided they’d all come along. The voting was unanimous.
And so the children climbed aboard to hear a tale or two—
precisely the same stories in the past that I told you.
Prompt words today are cluster, crossing, bulb, unanimous and carpet,
Above are photos taken yesterday morning (May 3.) What looks like a bank of clouds is actually smoke from a fire that has been raging for five days on the slopes of Mount Garcia, the extinct volcano across the lake from me.
The grainy shot above (taken with my phone, so not the best photo) was taken at about 1 a.m. this morning, May 4th, from my rooftop terrace. If you want to get a better view of the fire, have a look at the time-lapse video for the past 24 hours on this site: http://www.ajijicweather.com/lakecam.
When Forgottenman suggested I write about the fire, I reminded him that I actually had written about fires on Mount Garcia many years ago, and he further suggested I reblog that blog, so, always willing to please, below is a link. The Maria Phoenix restaurant I mention, which became a favorite of mine after this first visit, has since been sold to new owners, but still, as regular as clockwork, Señor Garcia (as locals fondly call the mountain) continues to wear his yearly sombrero of smoke. Here is the link to my poem about the fires eight years ago:
https://judydykstrabrown.com/2013/04/18/dining-alone-at-the-maria-bonita-restaurant-bar-day-18-of-napowrimo/
Evolution
Evolution’s done with behemoths. They take up too much space.
They were too slow and lumbering—lacking in poise and grace.
For this they paid the penalty of their eradication,
replaced by small creatures who consumed a smaller ration.
The intention was that humans would be weaker and less needy.
Who knew that they would turn into creatures so cruel and greedy?
Anything but genial, they grabbed what they could grab,
bringing devastation via bomb and gun and lab.
If larger didn’t work, it’s clear that smaller did no better.
Once again, nature’s creations have turned out her debtor.
She extracts her interest through flood and hurricane,
drought and deadly plagues and other methods more arcane.
Working up from smaller—from the atom and the quark,
nature reached its summit in Jurassic Park,
then created on a smaller scale ’til it arrived at man—
Homo sapiens her newest failed flash in the pan.
Now, where will she go from here? Tinier or bigger?
Will her next experiment be flyer, swimmer, digger?
Will she rue the excesses of the human brain
Or will she make the same mistake over once again?
Can she find a way at last to alter the machine,
by infusing it, at last, with the human gene?
Is a cyborg race of men the way that nature’s going?
Will mankind be coupled with things whirring, blinking, glowing?
Will we all be halfway clones of who we were before?
Will we think past generations to be the stuff of lore?
Have humans made themselves passé or will they rise once more—
a little less self-serving , less blemished at the core?
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.
Precognition
I don’t want to know what I’ll do ’til I do it.
If it’s preordained, it’s too late to eschew it.
If it’s a surprise, I would say that I blew it,
for there’s no surprise when we simply redo it.
With each future sorrow when we must preview it,
there is no advantage—just more time to rue it.
The vase will still break and we’ll still have to glue it.
The syrup with spill and we’ll have to ungoo it.
Would I accept foresight or merely poo poo it?
When push came to shove, I guess that I would boo it!
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.)
Click on photos to enlarge and read captions.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 