Boarding the Astral Plane
Living on the astral plane would be so very camp.
When you lie upon the ground, you never would get damp.
No one would delimit the boundaries of your soul.
Anywhere or anything could be your final goal.
If I could book a ticket on the astral plane,
I’d hop aboard and never come back to earth again.
Prompt words today are astral, camp, book and delimited. (Never heard that one before!)
Dear Son
Everything exhausts me. I’ve lost my zip and moxie,
so I’m surrendering control and giving you my proxy.
You can handle matters––earthshaking or mundane.
Having to make up my mind has grown to be a pain.
Today began my countdown for withdrawing from my life.
I’m hiding from decisions, the news and other strife,
compressing the world’s problems into a tiny ball
and hiding it someplace obscure that I will not recall.
I’ll binge-watch old TV shows like Dynasty and Friends
from their initial episodes right up to their ends.
I’m sleeping in ‘til ten o’clock, going to sleep at eight,
throwing away my calendar. I need not know the date.
Here are my credit cards and checkbook. Do with them what you will.
Run away to the Bahamas or pay my water bill.
I’m relying on your character and inborn need to please.
If you don’t pay the light bill, I guess that I’ll just freeze.
Please don’t report your payments. Don’t bother me at all.
Do not text or Facebook. Don’t tweet or Skype or call.
From here on in my life, as planned, is going to be a breeze.
No cooking or dish-washing. I’ll eat takeout Chinese
for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I’ll just do what I please––
I’ll rock for hours in rockers, my cat upon my knees.
I’ll have no need for intercourse. I’m cancelling the phone.
I’ll fill my life with pastimes that I can do alone:
Sudoku and Solitaire, crosswords and jigsaw puzzles––
no lady friends, no social sites. No kisses and no nuzzles.
Type two Agoraphobia is what they’ll say I’m suffering.
But only you and I will know that I am simply buffering.
I’ve been without phone and internet for two days.I’m posting this at a local restaurant.
Prompts for today are proxy, mundane, countdown and compress.
Premature Delivery
I can’t defend or explicate the reason for my ardor
for that triple-decker cake residing in my larder.
Tomorrow was its due date, the delivery premature.
Now I have a compulsion for which there’s just one cure.
My love is unrequited. That torte has neither lips
nor anything but calories to slip around my hips.
At this extravaganza they’ve planned to celebrate
my forty-second birthday on my birthing date,
there must be a cake to eat. I must be resolute
to not pre-sample one small bite. I am of fine repute
and do not want it known that I’m unable to resist
cake with chocolate icing, and so I must insist
that you call a locksmith to secure the door
with deadlock and with padlock and perhaps with one lock more.
If my cake survives past midnight and a few hours tomorrow,
I will defray embarrassment and a good deal of sorrow.
For minute after minute and hour after hour,
I fear resisting chocolate cake is far beyond my power.
I was born to greatness—to talent and to fame,
but when chocolate comes up missing, it’s likely I’m to blame.
Prompt words for today are extravaganza, resolute, unrequited and explicate.
Transmogrification
All our rites of passage wherein we choose a route
different from our life before–a new way that will suit
the person that we will become in the bye and bye—
a way that’s calculated to stump and mystify
those who cannot understand how we might want to switch—
why we have that need to change—to scratch that travel itch.
We scout out new horizons, travel uncharted roads.
Change our occupations, alter our abodes.
Thus does our universe expand and thus, so, do our lives.
In variety perpetual, evolution thrives.
Prompt words for the day are passage, switch, scout and mystify.
Lady in Waiting
He was the best creation of the queen and king.
and when she held him in her arms, he cancelled out the sting
of all the ladies in waiting who, noting well her shyness,
spent more time in waiting for his royal highness.
Neither naive or clueless, she tended to her tallying.
As he maneuvered his affairs, she noted the king’s dallying.
And as the young prince gained in years, growing more coherent,
she was his fond protector, his loving, loyal adherent.
One-by-one she noted the ladies, one and all
slip away—no longer there at her beck and call.
And as each lady in waiting went into her gestation,
another lovely maiden appeared to fill her station.
And so young princes flourished, on both sides of the blanket.
The velvet cord for service, when she had cause to yank it,
brought new faces yearly, or monthly at the worst.
Daily, as she faced the mirror, she patiently rehearsed
fond loving glances that she’d use as she addressed her ruler,
all the time retaining thoughts that were surely crueler.
Living every day the charade only for her son,
determined from his day of birth that he would be the one
chosen for succession—the legal royal heir.
She watched him with devotion, with tender lover care.
She’d create a king more loyal. More loving and more tender.
One less bent on conquering the more gentle gender.
By using his royal talents in pastimes much less crass,
perhaps a much more glorious age would come to pass.
More time spent in reigning and less time spent in bed.
More prosperity for all with him in charge instead,
and, in fact, her dreams came true once the king was dead,
her son declared the monarch and securely wed,
with prosperity for all and every subject fed,
this is the happy ending with no more to be read.
Prompt words today are prince, coherent, sting and creation.
Black Cloud
She felt she was a target for adversity
and rued the problems of her life in their immensity.
Each day was a new puzzle produced for her to solve,
as though she had to face it in order to evolve.
Her very productivity was challenged day by day—
always a new dragon to face and then to slay.
Year after year she dealt with trouble after trouble,
each day another needle meant to burst her bubble,
until her forced retirement brought relief at last.
No more new dilemmas coming at her fast.
When life that had been speeding by shifted down in gears,
still that feeling of relief she’d waited for for years
always seemed around the bend. Her spirits never soared,
for when her life turned trouble-free, she ended up just bored.
Prompt words today are puzzle, productive, target and adversity.
photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash.
Falling Star
We saw her in the movies. Her name was in the news.
This pulchritudinous starlet was hogging all the views
on youtube and on other social media sites—
the drinking and missed call times, the drugs and barroom fights.
Until America’s darling became a laughing stock—
a harried aging party girl for tabloids to mock.
Another crumbling idol turned to dust by fame.
Another aging loser of the movie game.
Today’s Word Prompts: news, pulchritudinous.
Finishing What God Started
Once the polar ice has melted and the animals departed,
It’s only right that we continue on with what we’ve started.
It will be the biggest news that humankind has won.
We’ll eradicate the universe, and our job will be done!
Prompt words for today are melt, news, universe and eradicate.
photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash. Used with permission.
Star
When asked to elaborate on his fame-plagued life,
he only mentioned family—his folks and kids and wife.
His whole battery of movies went without a mention,
and when they broached the subject, the air grew thick with tension.
“If you only rate yourself by how you earn your keep,”
he said, “you dig a trench that’s wide but isn’t very deep.
My work was just a scribble on the margins of my life.
Those roles I played of other people’s lives, I fear were rife
with violence and sadness, full of passion and its ills,
but they were all fiction just meant to pay the bills.
The story of my life was written out in grocery lists,
outings with my children, that woman that I kissed
at the least two times a day—each morning and each night.
My fame was a reflection of a deeper light.
The true role of my life was one that had nobody writing it,
no director or producer or studio inciting it.
It seems these days that what we seek is just escape and fiction.
We don’t have to live ourselves–a mere contrived depiction
of other people’s lives and thoughts more valid than our own,
preferring fruits of other lives more than the ones we’ve grown.
So though the meaning of my films are constantly debated,
the roles that mattered most to me were ones that I created.”
Word prompts today are elaborate, battery, yourself and scribble.
Tomb
Every tactless comment, every lurid lie
pollutes the world around us—the water and the sky.
Rude winds disturb the quiet with cacophonous shrieking.
From floods and fires and hurricanes, safe shelter we are seeking.
They expect our gratitude for charity provided.
Instead they should be shamed for it. Charged and then indicted.
They cause disaster every day. The world grows daily worse
as they turn the ship of state into a floating hearse.
Rivers flowing poisons—clouds of toxic gas—
unheeded in the legislation that they pass.
They make a crypt out of our world. They seal their children’s doom,
converting our whole lovely world into a giant tomb.
Prompt words today were gratitude, cacophony, quiet and tactless.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 