Rainy Day Doldrums
I’m frenetic with fog, frustrated by rain.
Drop after drop, again and again.
Drumming on roof tiles and gushing in gutters.
Dropping from drain spouts in loud splashing mutters.
Too cold and too dark to chance a meander,
I pull back the drapes to take a small gander.
This poem is a tribute to dryness and sun.
I’ll be glad when the rainy season is done.
I pull back the drapes to have a small ganderPrompts today are fog, frenetic, gander, tribute and glad.
Sticky Fingers
Gram’s a kleptomaniac. It’s known all over town.
She’ll glom onto anything the neighbors don’t tie down.
It’s obvious what she’s up to, for she takes no pains to hide it.
She’ll peer into the coffee spout to see what is inside it
and if it isn’t boiling hot, she’ll make off with the whole of it.
She’ll steal anything in sight, for “need” is not the goal of it.
She collects things in the daylight and sneaks out after dark.
She has no fear of guard dogs. She’s not warned off by their bark.
Unabashed, she faces up to every cluck and frown
as she steals coins from collection plates of every church in town.
My dad makes restitution and gives them more besides
while my mom checks out the stashes of everything she hides
and returns things to their owners. It’s become her daily chore
and Grandma doesn’t seem to mind. She goes out and gets more.
I don’t have to tell you that my Gran’s become notorious.
It’s fun for her but for the rest of us, it’s turned laborious.
We have to take turns following and keeping track of all
she sticks into her pockets when visiting the mall.
As she stuffs things in the right side, we extract stuff from the left.
She’s so busy pilfering, she doesn’t feel bereft
of all the things she stole before for she cannot remember
what she lifted seconds before with fingers swift and limber.
Mom and her brother say that soon we’ll have to lock Gram in,
but for now they’re letting her enjoy her life of sin.
For years she put up like a Saint with everything they did.
So for now they’re letting my grandma be the kid!!
Before you ask, this is fiction. Prompt words for the day are spout, glom, kleptomaniac, obvious and daylight, Image by Cassia Tofano on Unsplash.
Sticking to the Straight and Narrow
(Mother Superior’s Rejoinder)
Please do not lollygag. There’s no time more.
We’re closing the shutters and locking the door.
Wipe those dreams from your brain, for it is our fear
that your thoughts will diverge from the prim and austere.
Make sure your spirit is pearl white and pure
with no sinful streaks to compete with demure.
Deadly sins number from one up to seven,
and striated souls will not make it to heaven.
Prompt words today are lollygag, austere, brain, striate and lock.
Unrequited Affection
Love that’s unrequited garners no reward
as biological regions go completely unexplored.
Base instincts unconsidered insure that there’s no race,
with lover and beloved keeping a different pace.
Those romantic vistas each may view along the way
are simply viewed by “her” or”him,” for there is no “they.”
As wonderful as love may be when it’s reciprocated,
All-in-all some people find that it is overrated.
Prompt words today are requite, base, vista, garner and biological,
Image by Ilyuza Mingazo on Unsplash.
Only Child
She wants to trade her parents for contemporary versions.
She cannot stand their constant recital of aversions.
When it comes to expectations, their rule list never ends.
They derogate her clothes choice and her makeup and her friends.
When she wants to go on overnights, they won’t give their consent.
They never understand her or hear what she really meant.
Her dating makes them nervous. They wait up ’til she gets in,
then interrogate her as to what she’s done and where she’s been.
When it comes to parents, she got the rawest deal.
The schism that’s between them it seems will never heal.
Would she had an older sister who was ill-behaved and wild
to detract attention from this wretched only-child!
Prompt words today are nervous, consent, schism, derogate and trade.
Ludicrous Lore
They say the perpetrators all got off scot-free
by posing as indigenous, but how could that be?
They made a ludicrous trio, emerging from their car.
All wrapped-up like packages, they couldn’t wander far.
They’d been here stealing chickens from White Cloud’s poultry farm
on the reservation, but what could be the harm?
He had so many chickens that he’d never miss the one
or two or three or four or five that they had pinched for fun.
Yet with feathers in their hat bands and blankets held around them,
instead they uttered this excuse when the rangers found them.
They’d done a bit of hunting here on tribal land.
Their leader was Geronimo. He and his loyal band
had shot the deer with arrows, then bound it to their roof
with ropes tied ’round its antlers and then around one hoof.
But driving down the winding road, the driver got too dizzy.
(They said that it was vertigo that put him in a tizzy.)
That’s what caused the accident that spilled them off the road
where they toppled over sideways and lost their struggling load.
The deer ran off into the woods. It seems it wasn’t dead,
but merely stunned when arrows hit it on the head.
(Luckily, the bottle from which they’d all been drinking
had fallen in the water where the car was quickly sinking.)
It’s surprising that the rangers believed their tawdry tale,
and so they didn’t haul these buffoons off to jail.
They simply called a tow truck, which to their consternation
towed the whole bunch down the road to the reservation
where, alas, they found no kin but only laughter met them
as they huddled near the car and phoned for friends to get them.
And after they departed—hungover, sodden, sore,
their whole silly debacle passed into tribal lore.
The time those drunken cowboys with nothing else to do
sneaked onto the tribal lands and tried to pass for Sioux.
Their totaled car they left behind, and here the whole plot thickens.
It now serves as a handy coop for all the tribal chickens.
Today”s prompt words are scot-free, vertigo, indigenous and package. Image by Tyler Mulligan on Unsplash.
Simian Payback
In more ways than one, my new roommate is simious.
Eating bananas, he’s hardly abstemious.
His arms are so long that his fists scrape the ground
and when I am gone, he monkeys around!
When we go out in public, the people all gape.
It doesn’t take science to declare him an ape.
He swings on the curtains and ruins my decor
by pulling the drapes from their rod to the floor.
If you said he’s an ingrate, you wouldn’t be wrong.
When I go to the dentist and he comes along,
he mimes for a freebie—a checkup and cleaning,
then stands at the mirror, inspecting and preening,
never imagining he’s out of line
as I dole out the cash for his cleaning and mine.
Just one thing might mitigate his crazy acts,
so I ask that you temper your scorn with the facts.
He was raised in the jungle, then put in a cage
and only let out when he reached middle age.
So how could I help but assist in his exit
with no one around to thwart it or hex it?
With the key in the lock, I just gave a twist
and gave his jailbreak a needed assist.
But now I admit I was way less than clever,
for I have acquired the worst roommate ever!
What prompted my action? Was I less than smart
when I saw his great need, in playing my part?
I felt that I owed him a really big debt,
for an ape is way more than merely a pet.
If you studied your science and paid good attention,
you could not have missed this pertinent mention:
if there hadn’t been apes, then there wouldn’t be
any of you and there wouldn’t be me!
Prompts today are decor, ingrate, mitigate, abstemious and science. Image by Suzanne Schwartz on Unsplash.
False Endings
His paranoia is one for the books.
He finds disease wherever he looks.
He anguishes over the slightest small sneeze
and the tiniest bump brings him down to his knees.
When his girl left him, the heartbreak he felt
was myocarditis, and the smallest welt
on his neck or his face is cancer for sure,
so he’s off to to Mayo Clinic to look for a cure.
His fixation’s macabre and his acts supercilious
every damn time that he feels a bit bilious,
for he knows better than all of his friends
that he’ll soon meet his maker, so he makes amends
for all his ill deeds and his slights and his snits,
seeing the light when he’s down in the pits.
He should have done better and eaten less pie,
and now he’ll pay for it, for he’s going to die.
And when he gets better, you can bet he’ll be sure
that repentance has brought a miraculous cure.
So goes the story, and though it’s not his ending,
you can be sure that a new plague is pending!
(Note: I know I’ve used this photo at least a few (?) times before but it’s just so appropriate to this poem that I can’t help using it again. )
Prompt words today are: myocarditis, macabre, anguish, supercilious and paranoia.
Network
One who lives in isolation is only half alive.
We must generate a union if we’re going to survive.
Though it is true the fanciful may take this to extremes
and gallivant to excess, nonetheless it surely seems
that excellence in socializing might extend one’s life,
for nothing gets us through in a time of pain and strife
like family and friends. Perhaps one reason for our being
includes being seen as much as in our seeing.
Prompt words are fanciful, generate, excellence, gallivant and union.
Bar Stool Bozos and the Predictable Come-on Line
A new potential conquest is seen falling from her stool
in bodily protection from contact with this fool.
He’s a denizen of single bars, a problem to avoid,
for he’s sure to leave you listless, if not, in fact, annoyed.
How many boring platitudes can one bromide spout?
How may time-worn come-on lines are vying to get out
of lips that move unceasingly, spilling into the night
all the obvious clichés that he’s driven to cite?
Of all the gin joints in the world, why did he enter in
into the one where you came to have a quiet gin?
There should be a law passed that you get to vote on who
gets to wander into bars and saunter up to you.
They should have to pass an I.Q. test, then be sorted and tagged,
from “interesting” to “boring,” and the worst should then be gagged
with a small hole for a soda straw so they could go on drinking
without the ones around them having to know what they’re thinking.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
“If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?”
“We gotta get you outa that wet dress and into a dry martini.”
Prompt words today are bromide, falling, denizen and problem.
Note: Bromide in literary usage means a phrase, cliché, or platitude that is trite or unoriginal. It can be intended to soothe or placate; it can suggest insincerity or a lack of originality in the speaker. Bromide can also mean a commonplace or tiresome person, a bore (a person who speaks in bromides).
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 