In 35 years of growing bougainvillea, I have never seen the central flower bloomed out like this!
Here is how they usually look:
But, oops. I suddenly had a brainstorm and went outside to check again, and guess what? When I moved the bougainvillea branch aside, this is what I discovered:
That bloom was actually the bloom of this tiny succulent peeking through the bougainvillea. Another of life’s illusions shattered!
For Cee’s FOTD
Coping with the 2020’s
If These Walls Could Talk
“It’s for your own welfare that we tell you this,”
my four walls all conspired to tell me with a hiss.
Your life is but a fantasy. It’s dreams that tell the truth.
It’s daylight that echoes the things that are uncouth.
If you could but live in dreams, your life would be an idyll.
It’s living with reality that makes one suicidal.
Prompt words today are echo, welfare, fantasy and idyll. This poem was written in response to the below comment on THIS POEM made by my friend Mary Francis McNinch of the Murdo Girl blog. 
HERE is Mary’s own Talking House poem.
photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash. Used with permission.
Star
When asked to elaborate on his fame-plagued life,
he only mentioned family—his folks and kids and wife.
His whole battery of movies went without a mention,
and when they broached the subject, the air grew thick with tension.
“If you only rate yourself by how you earn your keep,”
he said, “you dig a trench that’s wide but isn’t very deep.
My work was just a scribble on the margins of my life.
Those roles I played of other people’s lives, I fear were rife
with violence and sadness, full of passion and its ills,
but they were all fiction just meant to pay the bills.
The story of my life was written out in grocery lists,
outings with my children, that woman that I kissed
at the least two times a day—each morning and each night.
My fame was a reflection of a deeper light.
The true role of my life was one that had nobody writing it,
no director or producer or studio inciting it.
It seems these days that what we seek is just escape and fiction.
We don’t have to live ourselves–a mere contrived depiction
of other people’s lives and thoughts more valid than our own,
preferring fruits of other lives more than the ones we’ve grown.
So though the meaning of my films are constantly debated,
the roles that mattered most to me were ones that I created.”
Word prompts today are elaborate, battery, yourself and scribble.
Some Nights
When waking hours grow too late,
ideas begin to percolate.
Chords we’ve found euphonious
may somehow seem erroneous
when we hear their altered streams
filtered through erratic dreams.
Life is made of dreams, we’re told,
but when the dark turns drear and cold,
however oft we’re told we’re chosen,
our potential may be frozen—
all our day-lit grand achievements
turned by night into bereavements.
We lie abandoned in our beds
with nightmares caught within our heads.
What a relief is dawning day
that relieves our need to pay
those ransoms that some dreams demand—
cast not in concrete but in sand.
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/03/06/fowc-with-fandango-percolate/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/03/06/your-daily-word-prompt-achievement-march-6-2019/
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/03/06/rdp-wednesday-euphonious/
Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown, jdb photo
Deep Voice
How do the lessons go when the student is the teacher, too?
That deep self writes clues in poetry
using a dream world to reveal the truths of day.
I trace its verity around my mind—
a well-known pattern
that has worn a groove I can’t escape.
Still hoping for a new ending, I pace the same old trail.
They are a fantasy, my hopes,
I must be taught the facts in Braille.
The prompt word today was trace.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 