Tag Archives: #RDP

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.

Face Off!

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Face Off!

It’s always there in front of me, greeting people first.
With having to live up to it, I always have been cursed.
When I want to look pious, it breaks out in a grin
revealing that within me there is a bit of sin.

It blushes when that boy walks in that I don’t want to know it.
I’m trying to be mysterious, and then I go and blow it!
It heats up and blushes when I’m trying to be cool.
How can something a part of me break every single rule?

When I doll up in my finest, then spend an hour on it,
adding shadow, blush and lashes, it decides to grow a zit!
I’m tired of facing up to its erratic bad behavior.
It seems to be my enemy when I most need a savior.

I’d like to go before it to decide what people see
before my face inserts itself, claiming to be me.
Then Covid comes along and gives me everything I ask.
Ironic that it takes a plague to furnish me a mask.

 

Prompt words today are faces, heat, pious, erratic, doll.

Night Traveler

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Night Traveler

Beneath the moon’s rotation and a sky cobbled by stars,
I lie upon my back and search for Jupiter and Mars.
The Milky Way creates a bridge for my imagination
which journeys down its highway without any hesitation.

Sequestered as I am by walls and blackness of the night,
there are no other travelers to share my nightly flight.
Only approach of daylight can bring this traveler home
as the morning draws a curtain over heaven’s dome.

 

Prompts today are bridge, sequestered, rotation, cobbled and approach. Image thanks to Ibrahim Shabil on Unsplash.

Give Me Blue

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ImageGive Me Blue

If it is a blue with no sadness in it:
the blue of the sky above Colima Volcano
with no other clouds in it except one puff
of earth’s hot breath becoming visible
in the cool morning air.

If it is a blue
with no middle ground of safety,
nothing that makes it ordinary.
No hue of boredom
or gray cast of age.
No tint of ever ending––
just pure blue
holding its mood in,
letting you feel however you want to feel.
The blue of glass that reflects the sky.
Iris blue and periwinkle.
Cerulean and cobalt.

If it is a blue with not a smudge of green in it,
or yellow or white or black.
Blue-blue like my sister’s daughter’s eyes
and like the color that a blueberry Popsicle
should be its blue dusted by nature
as though frosted, even in the heat of summer.
Like blue caught in icicles.
The color of a jellyfish
or Noxzema jar.
Bluebottle fly, tenacious,
only its color not annoying.
Blue as a shiver. Blue as blood. Blue as Hawaii.

Not the blue of a heart before forgetting.
Not that blue with a lot of
dullness soaked into it.

But if you have Blue as in Australia.
Blue as in a first place ribbon.
Sky blue,
true blue,
never blue.
Blue that if it’s ever had one gram of sadness in it,
doesn’t show it.
If you have that blue,
and you want to give it to me,
then, sure.

Give me blue.

Image

 

I had to reblog this poem written in 2013 for RDP: Cobalt

Illegal Crossing

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Illegal Crossing

The impatient pedestrian does not have time to wait.
If lights don’t change immediately, he’s going to be late.
The airs of his entitlement swirl busily about him.
He goes into a tirade when events begin to flout him.
He’s held his breath so long that his face is cobalt blue.
The city should adjust these lights. In fact, he’s going to sue.

Bliss for him is getting exactly what he wishes.
He is the shark who simply devours all the littler fishes.
And so he puts his hand up to stroll against the lights,
thinking all the motorists will grant him crossing rights.
But in seconds he is flattened and this just goes to show,
even if you’re a big shot, you can’t go against the flow.

 

Prompt words today are cobalt, pedestrian, bliss, tirade and entitlement. Image by Pawel Czerwinsky on Unsplash.