Tag Archives: Word of the Day Challenge

Disciplinary Action

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Disciplinary Action

Lately, my life is like a fresh peach
at the end of a limb, slightly out of reach.
With an air of foreboding, I reach out to pluck it,
then choose not to pick or bite into or suck it,
fearing fate’s censure if I choose to buck it.

The joy of communion seems lately to dissipate.
Events come and go but I do not participate.
Whereas once I said, “Yes,” now I always say “No.”
The presence of friends is a joy I forego,
for there seem to be dangers wherever I go,

Bamboozled by nature, what choice do we have?
This seems like a wound for which there’s no salve.
Each of us suffers, apart and alone
as if there are sins for which we must atone,
our closest communion carried out via phone.

We sit at our windows viewing the parade
of all of the glories that nature has made.
We Skype and we Facebook, we tweet and we Zoom,
feigning good cheer as we contemplate doom,
all of us children sent to our room.

Will there be an end to this long isolation?
If we mend our ways, will there be consolation?
If we clean up our oceans and clean up our sky,
can we address our sins , having figured out  why
mankind has  been chosen to sicken and die?

Prompts for the day are foreboding, bamboozle, peach, dissipate and presence.

Total Recall

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Total Recall

The world of our grandmother has been subsumed
by modern conventions but is exhumed
when remembering the cabin where all our relations
 joined us each year for summer vacations.

Ping-pong and campfires and dunks in the lake.
Muddy dirt beaches on which we would bake
and turn brown in the sun, turning over in turns
to inspect our tan lines and moderate burns.

S’mores over campfires and mulligan stew
cooked on the coals and trips to the loo
making our way in the moonlight at night,
battling mosquitos and all things that bite.

Slapping our necks and our arms and our knees
at chiggers and ticks and horseflies and fleas.
Such glorious penance to pay for the fun
of cousins and swimming holes, horses and sun.

Vacations contemporary just don’t equal
those trips of our youth that have no modern sequel.
They live in our memories where we remember
Pleasures of July we recall in December.

 

Prompt words today are ping-pong, contemporary, cabin, subsume and grandmother.
Again, this is fiction. The camping memories were actually from church camp in the Black Hills
where I went every year. Loved it.

Rainy Day Doldrums

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

False Endings

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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

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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.