Tag Archives: Word of the Day Challenge

Skinny-Dipping for One Word Challenge

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Skinny-Dipping

daily life color103

Important note: This is a shape poem , (at least the last two stanzas are) but if you look at it in Reader, it distorts the shape by left margin justifying.  Please click on the title again and you will view it from my blog where it will be centered and you can see the shape.

Skinny-Dipping 

There’s a change in the weather, a shift in the light.
The palm trees are swaying. Three stars shining bright.
The water is cooling, my exercise through.
Clouds cover the moon. I think it’s my cue
to get out of the water before I turn blue,
then clouds shift and the moon turns its usual hue.

The wind stirs the water. I think of past times
ages ago in different climes.
All those past lives, can they really be mine?
If I put experience in a straight line,
could I see the reason for things as they were
as my life sped by–—a perpetual whirr?

What gave me the courage to do what I did
since that time long ago when I was a kid
and took that first journey out on my own,
out of the house across grass newly mown,
fresh from the bathtub, laughing with glee,
nude for the whole world to look out and see.

Running down the sidewalk until I was captured
again by my mother, winded but enraptured
by this two-year-old daughter escaped from her bath,
already set out on her singular path.
So many roadways traveled since then.
So many different lives that have been

tried and discarded in favor of others.
Surrogate fathers and surrogate mothers,
surrogate sisters and friends freshly minted,
plane tickets ordered, paid for and printed.
Travel adventures. Dangers to survive.
Making it through it all still alive.

I come up     from the pool,
dripping and     shivering.
Those few    bold stars
above me    delivering
promises     that I
might still   be a rover.
While there   is breath left,
my life       isn’t over.

For Word of the Day the prompt is “Bathtub.”

“Wordless” for Word of the Day.

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Wordless

I wish that I could wow you with putting prompts to rhyme,
but I seem not to be able to do so at this time.
“Amplify’s” been silenced and refuses to fight back,
while its potential author is revealed as just a hack.

It seems my old acuity at making words behave
has somehow deserted me, branding me a knave.
The truth that I am lacking in *vocabular agility
has left me slightly flummoxed with a new vulnerability.

(*For all I know, some lexicographer’s already dissed
my coinage of a brand new word the dictionaries missed.)
This poet, once ferocious, has been worn down by time.
and I’m thinking in my next life I might come back as a mime.

The Word of the Day prompt is:  “Amplify.”

“Dental Discourse” for Word of the Day

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Dental Discourse

 

Dental Discourse

She could not stand the sad sad sight
of his horrendous overbite.
She arranged to take him to a
dentist, thinking he could do a
makeover.

She asked the doc what he would charge
to make his overhang less large.
The price he set to make each tooth less
was, I fear, greedy and ruthless
overkill.

Thus began their drawn-out dicker
that I think would have gone quicker
if his teeth had been less icky,
and the job a much less tricky
overhaul.

After much talk, they struck a deal,
both thinking that they’d made a steal.
But then with little else to do,
she said  if he attempted to
overcharge,

she would have his license lifted
no matter how bloody gifted
he might have been (when this all ends)
at cutting down her toothy friend’s
hangover.

 

The “Compound Word” verse form  consists of 5  five-line stanzas with aabb rhyme schemes, each containing 8 syllables and each stanza concluding with a three-syllable compound word that has one element the same as all other compound words in the final lines of the stanzas. Phew!

The Word of the Day prompt was Dentist.

“Pendulum” for Word of the Day, Aug 21, 2025

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Pendulum

Would passion carry the same voltage
or heartbreak the sting
if from the beginning we knew
that every extreme
brings us a step closer to its opposite?
It is that great pendulum of the I Ching—
that flowing from the yin to yang—
that foretells the fall of great regimes
glorious in their altruism
who, reaching their summit,
must head back again
towards cruel tyranny.

If we’d known this from the start,
each height would become
a day of mourning,
knowing that having reached one apex,
there is no further height to climb to.
and tomorrow, the start of our slow descent
will bring us closer to that other place
where dark will reign.

Part of the power of youth’s sweet ecstasy
as well as bitter heartbreak is that it seems as though
they’ll last forever.
This is the spice of life.
Its tough gristle comes later,
as we recognize that
everything,
everything                   everything
changes          into its
opposite.

 

The Word of the Day prompt is “Summit.”

For the Word of the Day Challenge, Aug 19, 2025

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Career Hubris

Her hems are crooked, her seams all puff,
and if that is not enough,
her fabric’s cheap, her colors clash.
So though her duds cost lots of cash
(because she calls it haute couture)
I fear she is an amateur.

For the Word of the Day challenge, the prompt is “Amateur.”

“Evil Eye” for Word of the Day, June 14, 2025

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Evil Eye

It floated off to the side,
disappearing when I turned to face it head-on.
It hadn’t his features, really,
but I felt his presence a dozen times after—
something floating just off the corner of reality.

Then, weeks later, in the bedroom—a bat.
It flickered against the white curtain and then disappeared.
Moments later, there it was again.
I jerked my head quickly around, flipped the curtain out,
examined its other side.
Moments later, there it was again.
Then a circle floated across to join it.
A hair floated down from above and stuck, center-vision.

A few hours later, the fireworks started—
flashing corollas of light just to the right of me,
like subtle flashbulbs going off.

This was when I decided I needed to see a specialist.
Yes, a retinal detachment, he agreed,
but not yet perforated.
Now, my movements curtailed,
I await that new cloudy ghost
that will be a harbinger
of surgery.

Every tope, every cobblestone
brings a new flash of light—
a signal to still myself.
No jumping. No Zumba.
No jogging. No lifting.

I wait, inactive, watching floaters
move to the center of my vision
and off to the side again.
I practice various levels of exertion,
waiting for the flash that signals rest.

I wait for words to float
across my vision,
to rend my inactivity
and prompt me
to pin them to the page––
to stitch them together
into a clearer sight
of what is there, invisible,
inside me, waiting for the tear
to let it out.
They are the ghosts
of the future
and I am the one
who seeks to gather them,
to mend the tear
and anchor
these slippery ghosts.

 

The Word of the Day prompt is “specialist.”

“Full Volume,” for Word of the Day, June 5, 2025

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Full Volume

I hear my neighbor’s fighting cocks crow into the night,
expressing their readiness for tomorrow’s fight.
There are always noises cutting through the dark.
I hear the donkey’s braying and the dog’s loud bark.

Some neighborhood weekend party goes on ’til four or five,
expressing at great volume that they’re glad to be alive.
The singing and the music and the fireworks exploding
that sometimes make me feel as though my head may be imploding.

The church bells in the village every quarter hour declaring,
trucks advancing street by street, loudspeakers rudely blaring.
One truck selling vegetables, another selling gas,
shouting out their wares to everyone they pass.

Others selling water or cooking oil or soap,
scrub brushes or sponges, plastic buckets or rope—
Motorcycles without mufflers roaring down the street
revving up their motors for every friend they meet.

Bandas in the plaza play at a decibel
that I swear could raise the bats straight up out of Hell.
Mexico isn’t subtle. It’s bright and bold and proud.
That’s why for everything in Mexico, the volume’s turned up LOUD!!!!

The Word of the Day is “Volume.”

 

“International Cheffery” , for Word of the Day, May 31, 2025

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“International Cheffery”

In the garden or on the hoof,
in the lake or on the roof,
we grow it, herd it, shoot it, hook it.
Pick it, wash it, chop it, cook it.

Wherever we see food, we take it.
Stir it, spit it, fry or bake it.
In Japan is the exception.
Some ancient chef had a conception

that he would not cook the fish–
just serve it raw upon the dish.
It is a strange way to be fed–
to eat a fish that’s merely dead!

In African countries, I have found,
they build a fire on the ground
and cook their food in cauldrons there
flavored with spices hot and rare.

In Sicily, the mafia bosses
favor rich tomato sauces.
First they’re fed by wife or mother,
then they go out and kill each other.

Mexicans use corn instead
of wheat to make their daily bread.
They fold it around beans or meat
and chilis to turn up the heat!

America’s a country where
there’s food from every country there.
What’s unique in our repast
is that we want our food here fast!

The word of the day prompt is chef.

Keyboard Athlete, for Word of the Day, May 26, 2025

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jdb photo

Keyboard Athlete

Not a great sportswoman—champion of none.
I sport a camera when having my fun.
My skill is not measured in baskets or bases.
I score my points while clicking at faces.

Though I’m not the most physical person you’ll meet,
I do exercise caution when crossing the street.
My main lack of muscle tone’s merely because
My pushup experience is mainly in bras.

As you vault over hurdles and excel at tennis,
the extensions I do are less of a menace.
Though I’m not an expert at sprinting or jogging,
my fingers are well-toned through everyday blogging.

For the Word of the Day Challenge, the prompt word is everyday.

“The Passenger,” for Word of the Day, May 13, 2025

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The Passenger

I see her back her car outside.
She never offers me a ride.
I go the same way she is going,
but she passes, still unknowing.

After ten long years, I stand
making no sign with head or hand.
My legs are tired. My back is bent.
My footsteps follow where she went.

It takes two minutes to go by car.
I take an hour to go that far.
If she knew, perhaps she’d say,
“Would you like a ride today?”

She would have rolled her window down
to offer me a ride to town.
I’d dust my clothes and step inside,
grateful, at long last, for the ride.

And at the bottom of the hill,
as though, perhaps, she’d had her fill,
She’d say, “I’m turning left from here.”
And I’d assemble all my gear,

and give my thank-you, even though
I need to go where she will go.
Charity goes just so far,
I think, as I exit the car.

I live about two-thirds of the way up a very tall mountain in Mexico, and often as I drive down to the main road, I give a ride to whomever I encounter walking down the cobblestones—especially the women, most of whom work as housekeepers in the houses in my fraccionamiento. But now and then when I am in a hurry or when I see a man suspicious-looking or dusted by his labors, I drive on by. Then I wonder what he is thinking as I guiltily observe him in the rear vision mirror.

 

The Word of The Day Challenge  today is passenger. Forgottenman found this poem I published long ago and suggested I used it for this prompt. He knows I am exhausted. Sweet, sweet man. Here it is.