Who Am I?
Am I an expensive ornament
you wear on your arm,
ignoring its effect
on those who stare
and envy you your bling?
Or an appendage—
another arm to fetch and carry
your son and daughter—
all those leftover
parts of you?
Or am I the wallpaper
dressing up the walls around you—
called the culprit by those
who do not know you are the one
who builds the walls?
Prompt words today are wallpaper, appendage, ignore, culprit and expensive. All images from Unsplash.
Genetics and the Lack of True Grit
Documentation passed down from the past
says that since time primordial, folks have been cast
from the genes of their ancestors, first unto last.
Thus, my nose is too long and my forehead is vast.
It’s a truth of genetics that leaves me aghast!
(Yes, I’d alter those features if only I dast,)
Prompt words for today are forehead, genetic, primordial, document and vast,
Image by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash.
Oldest Friend
She is my very oldest friend—I met her as a child.
Then she was the feisty one while I was shy and mild.
Diametric opposites, still we are never parted—
one of us the loner, the other open-hearted.
She makes friends everywhere we go. I’d rather be alone.
For all my hermit tendencies, she stirs me to atone.
She thinks up the parties and though loath to go along,
I give up my solitude to join the social throng.
We have coexisted throughout a lengthy life.
I thrive when I am single. She wants to be a wife.
When we are together, one must devour the other.
One at a time we make the choice: single girl or mother?
One succeeds the other in a continual chain.
As soon as one’s exhausted, the other shows again.
Our relationship is infinite. Neither can break away.
While she drinks all the shooters, I am the one to pay.
When I am the diligent student, she shares in all my glory.
I get to write the manuscripts. She gets to live their story.
One-by-one we take our turns determining our fate—
one of us always timely. The other always late.
Perhaps our friends are tired of not knowing which will show—
the one who’s energetic or the one of us who’s slow,
but our very oldest friends will simply wait to see,
knowing that whoever shows, either will be me.
Prompt words today are diametric, chain, infinite and devour
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/rdp-thursday-diametric/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/02/28/fowc-with-fandango-chain/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/your-daily-word-prompt-infinite-february-28-2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/devour/
Looking Glass Menagerie
I am trying to escape the menagerie—
all those selves I hold in front of me
as well as the ones I have let escape.
Those that run ahead—
the ones that are my future selves—
are here, hidden in the portrait that you see.
Domineering, perhaps. But seasoned with
an awareness of what might have created
all of the parts of myself I try to reign in.
This has produced a certain slowness to connect.
The natural is seasoned with a desire to honor dreams
of what I hope to be. When I look in the mirror,
I see them all: my mother and my grandmother
and my sisters. We demand, are stubborn.
Sometime we are martyrs, stifling tears.
Then suddenly, I pass them by like memories
of nightmares: all the anxiety attacks,
illnesses and heartbreak.
We are all wonderful performers,
using bad luck to fuel good.
The belles of our own ball,
we push back the grim news
of what we fear we really are.
Headstrong, we reach for what we can be.
Utterly addicted to change,
Tony or no Tony,
we are the stars of our own lives.
This is a poem I wrote a year and a half ago. (In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall.”)
The Prompt: The Mirror Crack’d—You wake up one morning to a world without mirrors. How does your life — from your everyday routines to your perception of yourself — change?
Mirror Fearer
Every time I walk past it, I look into the glass
and notice how my hair looks and then survey my ass.
I cannot help but look at it, every time I pass—
criticizing how I look, both fuzziness and mass.
And in my deepest feelings, despite my brains and sass,
I can’t avoid this feeling that men must find me crass.
And so I guess I really feel that it would be a gas
if you took away the mirrors from this self-critiquing lass!
We know within our hearts that personality
often cancels out what we can clearly see.
We all have known the men who, homely to the eye,
still have personalities sweet as cherry pie,
who win the ladies with their charm and humor that is wry,
causing them to line up for chances with this guy.
And the girl who’s plain until she starts to talk—
her face just so enlivened, you have to stand and gawk.
Made lovely by expression, intelligence and wit,
“beautiful” and “lovely” become the words that fit
when trying to describe this attractive little lass
who simply doesn’t bother with a looking glass.
Both have learned to conquer all their crippling fear—
to find the other side of doubt and kick it in the rear.
To face the world on their own terms and face it unafraid.
To take their rightful placement at the front of the parade.
But though we see what they have done, we do not always take
the road that for another seems to be a piece of cake.
You may find this poem to be most adolescent,
yet the feelings of our past most usually are present
throughout our lifetimes, though we seem to hide what we must feel,
leaving it to novelists and poets to reveal
the truths of all our agonies, the facts of all our fears—
all those things we’ve meant to face but yet hold in arrears.
I long ago discovered that writing must be true.
The only worthwhile topics are the things that bother you.
The lacks you find in others and the lacks within yourself
are what divide the poems in hand from poems on the shelf.
And so I must admit that fear’s my greatest hidden vice.
And since we all could do with taking our own sage advice:
I’ll say that with no fear, I would burn candles at both ends—
be as free with lovers as I am with friends.
I would have burned fingers, but an unbound heart.
All those lovely men, disregarded from the start
because I was too zaftig or not smart enough?
I’d face them nose-to-nose, and then I would call their bluff.
Today’s Prompt: Fearless Fantasies—How would your life be different if you were incapable of feeling fear? Would your life be better or worse than it is now?
Looking Glass Menagerie
I am trying to escape the menagerie—
all those selves I hold in front of me
as well as the ones I have let escape.
Those that run ahead—
the ones that are my future selves—
are here, hidden in the portrait that you see.
Domineering, perhaps. But seasoned with
an awareness of what might have produced
all of the parts of myself I try to reign in.
This has produced a certain slowness to connect.
The natural is seasoned with a desire to honor dreams
of what I hope to be. When I look in the mirror,
I see them all: my mother and my grandmother
and my sisters. We demand, are stubborn.
Sometime we are martyrs, stifling tears.
Then suddenly, I pass them by like memories
of nightmares: all the anxiety attacks,
illnesses and heartbreak.
We are all wonderful performers,
using bad luck to fuel good.
The belles of our own ball,
we push back the grim news
of what we fear we really are.
Headstrong, we reach for what we can be.
Utterly addicted to change,
Tony or no Tony,
we are the stars of our own lives.
The prompt today was “to find a news article and to write a poem using (mostly, if not only) words from the article! You can repeat them, splice them, and rearrange them however you like. Although the vocabulary may be “just the facts,” your poem doesn’t have to be — it doesn’t even have to be about the subject of the news article itself.”
With massive tornadoes, politician campaign funding fraud, murder and mayhem being the main stories of the day, I was hard-pressed to find any good news to write about. Finally, I chose a very long theater review in the NY Times which I picked at like a foraging chicken, picking a word here, a word there. Above is the resulting poem.
Here is a link to the NY Times article from which I drew words : NY Times Article
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 