Tag Archives: #RDP

An Apologia for Gasconade*

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An Apologia for Gasconade*

This poem, per se, is not profound, in fact it’s rather frowsy.
As poems go, I fear that it is going to be lousy.
Pretentiousness in meter, a travesty in rhyme,
I really fear that reading it will be a waste of time.
Its sheets will become linen, its walk a promenade.
The entire verse will turn, I fear, into a gasconade.*
If you see more than this in it, you’re seeing pareidolia.*
If you don’t know what this is, kindly refer to the scholia!.*

 

Prompts today are frowzy, per se, pareidolia, gasconade and linen.

*A gasconade is extravagant boasting or bragging. *A pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon in which the mind perceives a specific image or pattern where it does not actually exist, such as seeing a face in the clouds.

*Sesquipedalian  describes someone or something that overuses big words, as some of the prompt sites have lately.

*Scholia are grammatical, critical, or explanatory comments – original or copied from prior commentaries – which are inserted in the margin of the manuscript.

Blame the “Sesquipedalian” on me, as well as the  “scholia ,” which  was very handy as a rhyme for “pareidolia,” which I’m not responsible for.”

Nomenclatural Revenge

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Nomenclatural Revenge

My repulsive nickname is an affront to my pride.
Whoever might have coined it most assuredly has lied.
When I queried who the rascal was, the usual rumor was
that nasty girl Rebecca, and the reason was because

I was dating Walter, the one she lusted for,
but who, because he prefers me, continues to ignore
the bodacious Rebecca, remaining in my arms
just because he prefers my  considerable  charms.

In spite, that bitch Rebecca says the name “Clock Face” should fit
because my face has passing time written all over it!
So I have coined a name for her. I’m going to call her “Lips”
for all the food  passed through them that’s recorded on her hips!

Kiss-off, Rebecca!

 

Prompts today are clock face, bodacious, query, rumor.First image by Glen Hodson on Unsplash. Second photo by me.

Memory

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Memory

The excavation of our memories can glue us to the past,
unearthing shards of former lives into which we’ve been cast.
Our mind a virtual theater that draws us through its curtain,
sometimes half-remembering and hardly ever certain
of what is fact and what is mind’s creative fabrication—
the truth eluding us a bit in time’s confabulation.
Its draw narcotic, we accede once more to its allure.
Is it history or fable? How can we know for sure?

 

Prompts for the day are theater, allure, elude, excavation.Second Image by Tsunami Green on Unsplash. All others by me.

The Behavioral Linguist in Love: May 17, 2022

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The Behavioral Linguist* in Love

A thoughtful, scientific man, he chose his words with care.
No ordinary words would do. Only ones most rare.
He first spied her in the springtime, finally met her in the fall—
a simply gorgeous maiden—comely, willowy and tall.
But months of choosing his first words seem to have done him in.
What should have been his saving grace turned out to be a sin.

Enthusiastic in his love, he just had to express
his much-gone-over feelings about her loveliness.
He’d formerly determined not to use just any word,
but his final declaration turned out to be absurd.
He should have called her beautiful and just left it at that,
for when he called her pulchritudinous, she thought that he meant fat!

 

*Note: New to the world of behavioral science, Behavioral Linguistics is the science-based use of language to persuade. It’s rooted in nudge theory combined with psychology, sociolinguistics, and principles of marketing. Language is a powerful way to change behavior.

Prompts today are behavioral, enthusiastic, pulchritude, fall.  Images by Fabio Lucas and   Mandy Zhang on Unsplash.

Word Friendly

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Word Friendly
I have a rabid interest in snazzy ways of talking.
Sauntering or loping are more interesting than walking.
Dew is more refined than mere sweat or perspiration.
In short, words are much juicier infused with inspiration.

I isolate my favorite words, then bring them back together,
joining unacquainted words with hyphens as a tether.
I guess that I write poetry as an excuse to use them,
for words become your friends as you’re struggling to fuse them.

(If you’d like an illustration of this type of word-joining,  go HERE.

Prompt words today are guess,  rabid, isolate,  dew and  snazzy,

Wet Alibi

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Wet Alibi

Two thunderous bolts of lightning split the midnight sky.
No one was here to hear them. Only the dogs and I.
The priggish cats were nestled in a knot deep in their bed,
stomach against stomach, inverted tail to head.

Rain fell down in buckets. Lights flickered off and back,
then off again and all the world descended into black.
When some derelict wiring succumbed to the first drop,
I tried to phone a report  to the electricity cop,

but not a person answered at the guard house or Con Ed,
so I finally accepted that the whole world had gone dead.
No wifi meant no internet. No music. No TV.
A twelve-hour outage led to nil blogging activity.

And that is why the phone just rang with an inquiry.
Forgottenman was wondering what had become of me.
Was I not going to post? So I hastened to the job.
The lights are on. It’s time to feed the hungry blogster mob!


True story, all of it., except for the poetic license of calling the Mexican electrical commission (CFE)  Con Ed.  The rhyme, you know….Over 16 hours without electricity. My story and I’m sticking to it. Actually, half of the house was in brownout and the rest totally without electricity. Evidently this was an area-wide outage, but just in spots. All the houses around me were dark. Below me there were lights and this was true in all the villages along the lake. Weird.

Check out this post if you want to see some hard rain: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2020/08/17/sudden-hard-rain/

 

Prompt words today are thunderous,  active, derelict, prig,
accept.

Revolt at Walmart

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Revolt at Walmart

Give us the proper rebate if you want us to behave.
We have our coupons in our hands and we’re not going to cave.
It is not iniquity to ask for what you’re due.
Accede to our demands or we’re going to mount a coup.

So what if it’s a misprint in the paper? Not our fault.
Produce what you offered, for we’re not going to halt.
Although you say to honor it would amount to a steal,
20 for 1 seems to us a reasonable deal!

Prompt words for the day are proper, beam, rebate, iniquity and behave.

Gardener

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Gardener

As life tautens its string and pulls me along,
I delay thoughts of my funeral gong
with a story, a rhyme, a poem or a song,

creativity being the one way I know
to write my own ending for the end of the show.
Our quota of years, that cessation of flow,

that furtive departure, that summons to go,
that human surrender to the undertow,
need not be an ending to all that we know.

That’s why I have chosen to come here and stow
what little I’ve learned in an orderly row
of words on this page, following head to toe,

that tell parts of my life, be they pleasure or woe.
I plant them here, hoping that they will grow
into tall verdant meadows that you’ll want to mow.

Prompt words today are creativity, human, furtive, tauten and quota.

Overeducated

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Overeducated

I rue the day I sent my oldest kid to college,
for ever since he’s been deluging us with knowledge.
From “dermatones” to other concepts we can’t grasp,
his pedestrian lectures make us want to gasp.
He uses words archaic since majoring in Chaucer,
ostentatiously positioning his “cuppe” in his saucer.
He bores us all to death when his golf club raises turf.
He doesn’t raise a divot. Instead he cuts a kerf!
Constantly, he leaves us in a state of consternation
simply by engulfing us in too much information.

 

 

Prompt words today are dermatone, tear, archaic, kerf and pedestrian. Illustration thanks to Muhammad Rizwan on Unsplash.

Words for a Formerly Rejected Would-be Lover

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Words for a Formerly Rejected Would-be Lover

The prospects are quite iffy that you’ll shift my view,
but come equipped with custard and I’ll take a spin with you.
We’ll see if we have anything in common other than
a taste for boiled custard and a mania for flan.

Prompt words today are shift, spin, custard, iffy and equipped. Image by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash.