Tag Archives: Word of the Day Challenge

Happy Hour

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Happy Hour

Let’s get together to workshop our souls,
then toss our past regrets back in their bowls.

Though life’s a lottery, full of calamity,
we are the agents of all of its amity.

Choices we make determine our ends.
Fate’s only responsible for its trick bends.

You bring the biscuits and I’ll provide wine.
We’ll discuss life as we sip and we dine.

No better remedy for life’s aversions
than hors d’oeuvres and drinks to provide our diversions.

 

Prompt for today are workshop, lottery, biscuit, calamity and agent.

Plum Pit, Apple Core

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ecologyeco

Plum Pit, Apple Core

Never saw an apple tree, never saw a plum
that I didn’t want to reach out and get me some.
Bite into the fleshy fruit. Chew around the pit.
Spit it out into my hand to get rid of it.
Dig a hole to bury it. Smooth it with my heel
to grow another fruit tree for a future meal.

Such a simple motion in a world grown gross—
most folks isolated, fearfully morose
about  nature’s rebellion against humankind.
Reaching deep within her and taking what we find
without giving back again—everybody keen
on scraping out her riches with some grand machine.

For manifold acts of mankind, dangerous and mean,
nature has not found an adequate vaccine.
But, by giving back again, we signify devotion
to start to rectify our sins with a simple motion.
Let’s help her out by simply remaining aware
that each and every one of us needs to start to care.

By every single action, let’s demonstrate our wills
to rectify our heedlessness, atone for all our ills.
For everything that we take out, putting something back.
To therein change our dangerous course and take another tack.
Just a simple gesture, signifying more.
Building back our world pit after pit, core after core.

We talk about solutions, never coming close—
spewing words not actions, maddeningly verbose.
But if every person just took their life in hand,
polluting less, enriching their surrounding land,
perhaps we’d shift the balance, tree by tree by tree,
restoring our world to what it’s meant to be.

Prompt words today are plum, motion,  vaccine, verbose and never. 

May/December Marriage

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May/December Marriage

She rises up from her repose,
kohls her eyes, contours her nose,
puts on the diamond and the gold
for which her liberty was sold.

Dons her linen, silk and fur.
Puts on fresh perfume to obscure
with bergamot and rose and myrrh
those memories now but a blur.

This will be her life hereafter:
less spontaneity and laughter.
All her beauty and her charms
cradled in an old man’s arms.

Prompt words today are repose, gold, laughter, fresh and blur. Image by Bibek Thakuri on Unsplash, used with permission.

Coronavirus and the Corner Bar

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Coronavirus and the Corner Bar

He scrubbed the bar with cleanser and moved apart the chairs
with six feet in between them and just a few in pairs.
He sterilized the counter with that gelatinous goo
that had become ubiquitous, as he was told to do.

He laid off all his servers and bartended well-masked,
ready to do with diligence whatever he was asked.
Yet his barstools sat neglected, for no one came to play
and his profit margin  was shrinking every day.

His savings were depleted by rent and overhead
 as all his favorite regulars stayed at home in bed.
When he looked at the percentages, he knew he had to act.
In one month he’d be ruined—bankrupted, in fact.

He took a bottle of the gin he’d used to such acclaim,
forgot vermouth and olives, taking careful aim,
to spill it down the counter where it ran down to the rug,
then upset a candle and departed with a shrug.

Carefully he locked the door, got in his car and left.
Basically broken-hearted, feeling gutted and bereft.
He saw flames in his rear-view mirror, his problems rectified
as he took the only out, committing barmecide.

 

Prompts for today are cleanser, basic, barmecide, acclaim and percentage. Photo by Jack Prichett on Unsplash, used with permission.

P.S.  If you wondered, as I did, what “barmecide” really means, as an adjective it means illusory or imaginary and therefore disappointing. As a noun, it means a person who offers benefits that are illusory or disappointing. Nope, I just couldn’t inflict that upon you.

 

En Mass Transit

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En Mass Transit

Traffic comes and traffic goes,
but where they all go, no one knows.
They gun their engine, shift a gear
to be anywhere but here.
North goes south and south goes north,
driving, driving back and forth.
Wearing tires out, burning gas,
changing where they are en masse.
In New York, Paris, Pittsburg, Rome,
Nobody seems to just stay home!

 

The Word of the Day Prompt today is traffic.,

The Custodian’s Lament

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The Custodian’s Lament

I’m deluged by duty and lack an excuse.
A note from my mother won’t stop this abuse.
My boss has turned into that proverbial bully
who insists that I carry my job tasks out fully.
He says sweep the corridor, empty the trash.
It’s a menial method for earning my cash.
Wish I’d paid more attention in school back when
my teachers insisted that I take my pen
and answer those questions in English and math,
and started my life out on some other path.
Now I’m pushing a mop instead of  a pen,
thinking too late of what might have been!

 

Prompts for today are excuse, corridor, proverbial, deluge and duty. Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash, used with permission.

Marriage Vows

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Marriage Vows

Sure of their joyful union, they’ll never rue the day
that they exchanged their vows on that blissful day in May,
but read their bitter interviews gathered five years hence,
accusing and denying, angry, bitter, tense.
Those whom God hath brought together let no human flout.
Every couple means their vows when given, there’s no doubt,
but kids and bills and taxes and a pretty new assistant
can create a need to grow increasingly more distant.
Hard to keep compliant to a former vow
when fate intervenes with that ever-changing now.

 

Prompts for today are union, sure, joyful, may and interview.

The Window-Peeker Parses the School Marm

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The Window-Peeker Parses the School Marm

Though you’re unaware that you’re in my view,
as you sit parsing sentences, I’m parsing you.
And though you may find my excuse to be spurious,
I’m not lascivious. I’m only curious.

I peer through your window to discover a clue
if tight-lipped and buttoned-up is the real you.
I peek through a bush after climbing your fence.
Do you underline verbs and determine their tense?

No bushes or flower vines hamper my vision
to soften the view or to curb my derision.
Your life is as clear and empty and sparse
as the students you aim for and lines that you parse.

Every inch covered from your toes to your chin,
terry cloth robe. No booze and no men.
No bright colored pictures to cover your wall.
Not one detail to alter your image at all.

You sit at a desk looking tired and grim,
pallid and stringy and scrawny of limb—
essays piled to left and to right,
your strict narrow lips revealed in the light.

Everything minimum, like you have taught.
Strip sentences bare. Make them sparse, clear and taut.
Then you push back your chair, straight-backed and hard-seated
and seem to sigh. Is your patience defeated?

As you move to the window, a surge of past fear.
Have you sensed an old student is hovering near?
As you come to view the moon’s budding crescent,
I slip over the fence and become evanescent.

 

On day 29 of NaPoWriMo, they urged us to peek into a window and tell what we see.
Meanwhile, the prompts from five other sites were: curious, hamper, evanescent, parse and minimum.

Moratorium

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Moratorium

I’m waging a campaign against your excesses.
You don’t need more shoes or jewels or dresses.
I’m sending a notice to wherever you shop
that your random purchases just have to stop!

Your profligate spending’s way out of control.
Abstemious behavior should be your new goal.
I abhor that I’m having to start this campaign
and hope that my efforts will not be in vain.

I’m not suggesting that you turn ascetic,
It’s simply that your present life is pathetic.
You buy and you buy and you buy and you buy
’til the Amazon boxes are stacked to the sky.

Then you head to the mall to buy a bit more,
’til your closet is fuller, I swear, than the store!
Now my salary cannot keep up with the strain,
so I must insist, dear, you try to refrain.

To help, I have cancelled your credit cards, then
tackled your charge accounts, closing all ten.
I’ve taken you off my bank account, too.
hoping to try to educate you

to the fact that life’s more than spending and spending.
I hope that my excessive acts will be ending
your own excesses, and that you’ll find
new hobbies to fill your acquisitive mind.

Prompt words today are random, abhor, abstemious, ascetic and campaign.

Our Better: Nature

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Our Better: Nature

Science just can’t help it. It has to interfere,
trying to come up with things that formerly weren’t here:
pesticides and atom bombs, styrofoam and plastic,
genetic engineering and other “cures” more drastic.

Mother Nature chuckles and sends a flood or fire,
a hurricane or drought or backlashes more dire.
We try to get the best of her, but in the end she’ll win.
for though we try to overlook it, she’s the body that we’re in!

When we seek to alter her, we also alter us.
She’s the vehicle we ride in and we can’t get off the bus.
We’re poisoning her lifeblood and littering her skies,
interfering with her cycles in ways that are not wise.

When we overpopulate, she counters with a virus.
Her avalanches bury us, her floods and mudslides mire us.
If we were Nature’s employees, I think that she would fire us,
bemoaning that decision she made to ever hire us.


Two of my usual prompt sites had not published their word by the time I did my prompt poem today so I only used three prompts. This morning they are published so I’m writing a second poem.The Ragtag prompt today is Help and the Word of the Day prompt is science.