Piecemeal
Two lives once pieced together
one day may come apart.
Who knows if time will loosen
that fine mosaic of heart
that happened after melding
two souls into one?
Even mighty continents
slowly come undone.
For dVerse Poets Pub. To see other submissions to this prompt go HERE. Mosaic by Alma Thomas
Vixen
You are a crafty sorceress who holds men in your spell.
You clutch their hearts within your grasp where you squeeze them well,
then drain their living hearts of blood and leave them with a shell
with which to fend off, for a lifetime, loves which may be true,
but which they do not trust at all simply because you
have branded them for life with doubts perpetually new
each time they try to ply love’s trade to find something’s amiss
as, still again, a rueful fog envelops each new kiss.
Thus, with sketchy prospects, loves two, three, four, five, six,
are extinguished by that first cursed love that blows out all their wicks!
For the Sunday Whirl Wordle 625 the prompt words are: sorceress sketchy life , you, brand six, still, fog hold spell fend ply
Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown
Unmasked
I’d like a mirror so I can see
if I display felicity
when someone whispers in my ear
the name of one I once held dear.
I know not what my heart may feel,
what passions I might dare repeal
now that my head is ruling me
instead of love for somebody
long departed––no longer here
for so many a long-lost year.
If I could paint a picture of
the countenance of long-lost love
in monotone or multi-tones,
in stereo or monophones,
I hesitate to admit that
I fear the portrait might fall flat.
How often it has been my ploy
to act withdrawn or bored or coy,
as though the long-lapsed love I bore
is what steers my grieving core.
But, in truth, duplicity
is what in all simplicity
guides my actions and my thought
and turns me into love’s robot.
With paint cans colored various hues,
why do I always choose the blues,
rebuffing each potential woo
and dropping out of courtship’s queue?
And so, if love is not a ruse––
a mere excuse for whom to choose,
I stand here gawking, open wide,
with no place left in which to hide.
Respectability’s passe,
and pride too dear a price to pay;
for staying safe in grief’s tight room
is burial before the tomb.
And so my dear, this poem you view?
Pretend that it’s addressed to you
and join me in complicity.
Perhaps shared words can set us free.
I’m not a girl. You are no boy.
This poem is not a word-stuffed toy.
Should you respond with words that match,
it’s possible that we will catch
another chance to reach and choose
and maybe this time we won’t lose
the golden ring that does not bind.
This time we may find love is kind!
For Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge #228
This is actually a poem I wrote seven years ago but for some reason, your photo reminds me of it so I changed the name and I’m reprinting it here. Is that cheating???
Reclaimed Words
I fall victim to your shallow spell,
shattered by your drifting gaze
that catches on me, then drifts on,
to mingle with the gathering haze.
The damp roils in and sunlight dims,
night mingling with the fading day.
The shattered call of evening birds
echo and then fade away.
When I call out, words split in two,
spilling their meaning to the sand.
When I attempt to gather them,
they fall again from twitching hand.
As you retreat, your power fades
and I reclaim each scattered word,
change their order and intent
into phrases less absurd.
Words once wasted assume power
directed at another ear.
Amazing how the selfsame words
gain power with a loved one near.
For The Sunday Whirl: Wordle 611 the words are: mingled dim damp shallow spell gaze drifts shattered call twitch words split
Not a Love Poem
This is not a love poem. I will not relate those charms
you’ve displaced from earlier boundaries to someone else’s arms.
You no longer fill my daydreams and every random thought.
I’ve cleared my mind of schemes with which it formerly was fraught.
You are not the one I reach for to fill out the night.
Not the one I quote to friends. Your wisdom I don’t cite.
I’ve ripped up all the old words and replaced them with these:
bounder and philanderer, liar, cheat and sleaze.
And now that I have located the words that better fit,
whatever is the opposite of love poem? This is it.
For NaPoWriMo today we are to write a poem that talks about what something is “not.” Image by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.
A Flowery Metaphoric Rejection on a Bad Cold Day
When it comes to heroes, I prefer mine picaresque–
not one that clouds his meanings in terms more picturesque.
“We could make some upbeat music?” Your intent I can’t detect,
so I must entreat you, try to use words more direct.
All my friends have warned me you’re desirous of my hand,
but you seem to seek my membership in some sort of band.
I, too, can speak in metaphors, admiddedly not choral,
for instead of musical, my imagery is floral.
I cannot speak concisely for I have ad awful code.
But as to our conjoining,? Gotta snip it in the node!
(Disclaimer: I had written this all in lingo that sounded like a bad cold, but it seemed indecipherable, so I reverted to just using it in the last two lines.)
Prompts today are upbeat, picturesque, direct, entreat, node and membership.
Also, For NaPoWriMo 13
Forms of Communication
Your thoughts
form a balloon
above your head,
as obvious as the look
that flits across your face
when you think I am not looking.
I recognize its message.
“This woman is too garrulous.
I could use a little help here
to obviate the flood—
truth, to be sure,
but too much,
too late.”
Prompt words today are balloon, help, garrulous, obviate and recognize. Image by Drew Hays on Unsplash.
Better Off Friends
A study of your phenotype reveals that something’s missing—
a fact that I have noticed in our hugging and our kissing.
You seem not to be happy while following desire.
If you were a crematorium, they’d have to stoke your fire.
So although you are not lacking in gaiety or fun,
when it comes to sex appeal, I fear, my dear, you’ve none.
Prompt words for today are phenotype, study, crematorium, gaiety and following desire.
the set of observable characteristics of an indiv. resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment
Odd Couple
She had a nature most erratic
whereas his was mainly static.
She was a girl who liked to rock.
All day he sat and watched the clock.
Few pleasures did he ever find
in his life work’s daily grind.
When they first met, I must confess,
he questioned how she chose to dress.
High heels with socks were not the way
that ladies dressed back in his day.
She was eighteen and he was forty.
She dressed funky. He dressed sporty.
He liked golf. She loved the clubs.
She chewed her fingernails to stubs
worrying about the planet’s fate.
She slept around. He didn’t date
and worried not about emissions
nor those Save the Earth commissions.
What soul who knew them both would guess
they’d ever meet, or even less
imagine that they’d get along—
he with his pipe, her with her bong?
Let’s put them in each other’s way.
See how they’d act. See what they’d say.
She meanders through the park
in the evening, before dark.
He’s walking home from the ninth hole.
She rounds the corner, he crests the knoll.
They meet soon on the walkway path.
They have to pass. You do the math!
She eyes his clubs. He eyes her socks.
Her expression questions, but his mocks.
He doesn’t nod, she doesn’t greet.
If you were wishing they might meet,
you’ll have to write your own romance.
These two as lovers? There’s no chance!!!
Prompt words today were rock and guess. Here are links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/02/24/rdp-sunday-rock/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/02/24/guess/
“An un-love poem isn’t a poem of hate, exactly — that might be a bit too shrill or boring. It’s more like a poem of sarcastic dislike. “
The Ways I Do Not Love You
I do not want to count the ways I do not love you.
To do so casts me too solidly in your image
without your excuses
for doing what you did:
that you were crazy-jealous,
crazy-in love, crazy-in rejection,
crazy period.
I had always wanted to be loved to distraction,
but being loved to craziness is another thing:
your deep truck tracks carving artless Nazca lines
into the fresh sod of my yard,
the new mailbox snapped off at its base,
the queries from strangers who had met you in a bar
and heard all of the intimate details
of your insane version of our love affair.
The letters to every member of the school board,
every administrator in the district, every lawyer,
every preacher in our town of 50,000,
telling of the wild schoolteacher
and outing her gay friends.
I do not want to count the ways
you proved the heartbreak
of your love for me,
those ways that now delineate
the ways I do not love you.
I do not even love the memory of you
at Vedauwoo, standing on the monolithic rock,
your sun-shy son crouched in its shade.
I do not love the memory
of driving to Jackson Hole,
the twelve-foot-high banks of snow
on either side of the highway
that made it impossible to slide off the road.
The dark, split by our headlights,
pixilated by the mesmerizing onslaught of snow;
and suddenly, the miraculous glimpse of the giant elk
arcing from the left hand snow mass, high above us, over to the bank on the other side,
leaving us spellbound and mute,
as though this was a miracle
neither of us had the words to describe.
What are you, about 21? You asked
that first night at the Ramada.
The music was starting
and I thought you were there to ask me for a dance.
When I answered 26, you smiled that crooked smile
and walked away.
That unpredictable mystery of you
was what kept me intrigued.
I never could stand the ordinary.
Not that I love the memory of this.
And not that I know how long the list would be
of why I do not love you any more.
My mind wanders through the memory of you
like a lazy woman picking chocolates:
testing one and discarding it.
Choosing another.
Finally deciding
perhaps it is the brand of chocolates
that does not suit.
Oh, my once-darling,
I despise the thought of you.
Even these intrusive memories
cannot win me back.
You told me once, “Babe, you are so good
that you don’t even realize your powers.”
You’d lost your job and most of your friends
and blamed it all on me.
Even your friends had chosen my side, you said,
blaming me when I didn’t even know there was a game,
let alone its rules or its consequences.
I do not want to number all the ways
I do not love you anymore.
Suffice it to say that once over,
love might as well have never been.
Like a snowflake on a sun-warmed sidewalk,
there is no evidence
of its ever having existed.
Better to exhaust one’s efforts on a new love,
for there is no way to list the ways you do not love.
No way to bring to light now that list
that you have never written.
That list.
That list that you keep hidden
in the back of your heart
with all of your life’s other
impossibilities.
This is a piece I wrote four years ago, reblogged for a prompt from dVerse Poets Pub.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 