Goodbye Note to Harvey
I’m gobsmacked by your foolishness, tired of your guff.
Your tales of glory are too much and this girl’s had enough!
Your mercurial rise to fame, your hobnobbing with stars,
only bought you membership in a club with bars.
Now they are behind you, the power, women, booze.
I trust they’re not available in the cellblock where you snooze.
Prompt words are gobsmacked, mercurial, snooze, membership and guff. Image by Grant Durr on Unsplash, used with permission.
Though you’re unaware that you’re in my view,
as you sit parsing sentences, I’m parsing you.
And though you may find my excuse to be spurious,
I’m not lascivious. I’m only curious.
I peer through your window to discover a clue
if tight-lipped and buttoned-up is the real you.
I peek through a bush after climbing your fence.
Do you underline verbs and determine their tense?
No bushes or flower vines hamper my vision
to soften the view or to curb my derision.
Your life is as clear and empty and sparse
as the students you aim for and lines that you parse.
Every inch covered from your toes to your chin,
terry cloth robe. No booze and no men.
No bright colored pictures to cover your wall.
Not one detail to alter your image at all.
You sit at a desk looking tired and grim,
pallid and stringy and scrawny of limb—
essays piled to left and to right,
your strict narrow lips revealed in the light.
Everything minimum, like you have taught.
Strip sentences bare. Make them sparse, clear and taut.
Then you push back your chair, straight-backed and hard-seated
and seem to sigh. Is your patience defeated?
As you move to the window, a surge of past fear.
Have you sensed an old student is hovering near?
As you come to view the moon’s budding crescent,
I slip over the fence and become evanescent.
On day 29 of NaPoWriMo, they urged us to peek into a window and tell what we see.
Meanwhile, the prompts from five other sites were: curious, hamper, evanescent, parse and minimum.
He wants to know what’s all this fuss
about being unscrupulous.
Honor to him is just a fable—
His every act meant to enable
a law or bill or legal tort
as a means to then exhort
his cronies to increase his fame
to pad his pockets and laud his name.
His vacant eyes contain naught
of what he did for what he’s got.
A patriot for sure he’s not.
If I were forced to make a list
of all the ways he is not missed,
I fear the list would stretch so far
as Katmandu or Zanzibar.
And though I know them all by heart,
I do not have the time to start
at the beginning and reach the end.
So I’ll just say, here and anon,
that I’m relieved that he is gone.
Prompt words today are enable, scrupulous, vacant, list and exhort.
Photo by Srikanta from Unsplash, used with permission.
I’m waging a campaign against your excesses.
You don’t need more shoes or jewels or dresses.
I’m sending a notice to wherever you shop
that your random purchases just have to stop!
Your profligate spending’s way out of control.
Abstemious behavior should be your new goal.
I abhor that I’m having to start this campaign
and hope that my efforts will not be in vain.
I’m not suggesting that you turn ascetic,
It’s simply that your present life is pathetic.
You buy and you buy and you buy and you buy
’til the Amazon boxes are stacked to the sky.
Then you head to the mall to buy a bit more,
’til your closet is fuller, I swear, than the store!
Now my salary cannot keep up with the strain,
so I must insist, dear, you try to refrain.
To help, I have cancelled your credit cards, then
tackled your charge accounts, closing all ten.
I’ve taken you off my bank account, too.
hoping to try to educate you
to the fact that life’s more than spending and spending.
I hope that my excessive acts will be ending
your own excesses, and that you’ll find
new hobbies to fill your acquisitive mind.
Prompt words today are random, abhor, abstemious, ascetic and campaign.
Prompts for today are pizzazz, fortunate, vagrant, innate and frame. The photo really is of my mother, but the poem is fictional. My mother taught me lots of things, but not how to walk seductively!!! ;o)
Kissing Frogs
If you blow on a warty frog, he’ll worship you for life,
and if you are a princess, he might make you his wife.
Of course it won’t be easy with an amphibian beau,
for you’re sure to draw attention everywhere you go.
Although you’ll be very high and he’ll be extremely low,
as you hop along together, he’s bound to find you slow.
He won’t be good at dancing for with that tiny bod on him,
it will be a certainty that some dancer will trod on him.
A certain growth of character is a prerequisite
for any royal daughter to go along with it.
Your kids would be unusual for though a son or daughter
would excel at feats like swimming in the water,
when it came to royal functions, their gooses would be cooked,
for in any ceremony, they’d be overlooked.
So it’s all right to blow on frogs, to kiss them or to carry them,
but if you are a princess, it is best that you don’t marry them!
Prompt words today are inevitable, sympathetic, drivel and shoulder.
Cowboy on an Off-White Charger
You say I’m queen of your affection, yet your ambit has grown larger.
I hear you’ve put some extra miles on your faithful charger.
You say she is exhausted, her endurance sorely taxed.
She may need reshoeing and your credit card is maxed.
The extent of your travels and the speed with which you charge
have lately increased greatly—to have doubled, by and large.
If our love’s become monotonous, perhaps you seek new favors.
Perhaps you choose to taste delights of various other flavors.
You say your boots are dusty and nonchalantly stroll
out to find a shoeshine boy to cleanse your dirty sole.
Yet what you seek to polish may be a point that’s moot.
I think that what needs polishing may not be a boot.
Prompt words today are dusty boots, monotonous, ambit, speed and queen. The NaPoWriMo prompt today discussed different poetic devices. In lieu of just using one of them, I decided to try to use metonymy, polysemy, synecdoche and metalepsis in one poem. Image by Karen Cantu on Unsplash, used with permission.
words
Prompt words today are encephalopathy, such, cattywampus, comminatory and partner.
Bad Words!!!!
I’m feeling vengeful toward “comminatory,” a term I find absurd.
Fatigued by “encephalopathy.” Who heard of such a word?
Has the world of prompts gone “cattywampus?” Have you all gone mad?
Can such words be shaped into a poem that isn’t bad?
How can one partner such weird words? What’s a scribe to do?
Except to face the challenge and write a poem she’ll rue!
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 