Tag Archives: your daily word

Gain and Loss

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Gain and Loss

I’ve found I simply must inure
myself to things I must endure.
I’m overweight and immature
and told my writing is obscure—
written in a dialect
that people find hard to detect.

I joined a gym, but now my trainer
says he cannot make it plainer
than to say I won’t lose weight
until I choose to fill my plate
with other food and smaller portions
to decrease present proportions.

I thought if I became a spinner
I’d become a weight-loss winner,
but in fact, no pounds I’m doffing—
only panting, wheezing, coughing.
But I didn’t waste the time.
At least I came up with this rhyme.

Now perhaps if you’d elect
to check my poem’s dialect,
you’d find that though my waist and thighs
have not decreased in girth or size,
perhaps I have lost one small thang.
Have I lost, perhaps, my Dakota twang?

Today’s prompt words are winner, dialect, coughing, proportion, trainer and obscure. Image by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash.

Spray-paint and Poetry

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Spray-paint and Poetry

Written as calligraphy or scrawled upon a wall,
a book tucked in our pocket or extending down the hall,
expressed as tight couplets or as an angry stew,
words impart great insight and volunteer a view
into minds of wisdom or the hapless few
who unfortunately have little else to do

but to spray-paint imprecations of gender or of race
here in public places where all of us must face
those dark spots of the soul brought into public view
so volunteers of vitriol can share with me and you
those murky muddy sentiments better buried deep
instead of out here in the world to cause us all to weep.

If left to steep within the soul perhaps some inner magic
might turn them into poetry—profound and deep and tragic.
Some inner mental chemistry performing that gestation
that makes insight of vitriol, transforming imprecation
into understanding to write upon the pages
of potential misanthropes transformed now into sages.

 

Or, in a nutshell:

Metamorphosis

imprecation
perturbation
emanation
vacillation
gestation
germination
education
equation
mutation
anticipation
excitation
elation
maturation
new creation

True, probably more graffiti is about love than hate,
but these poems are written in response to the latter.

Guiding words today are hapless, imprecation, insight, volunteer, mud and calligraphy.

Reading Challenged

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Reading Challenged

Diana Gabaldon’s romances are way too historic.
Koolkosherkitchen‘s recipes? Delicious, but caloric.
Mo Willems counts on pigeons to chase away the blues,
but I’d never volunteer to fill any pigeon’s shoes
due to my fear of flying, so even in a pinch,
to read of being  airborne causes me to flinch.

Can’t read Cormac McCarthy or Murakami either.
When violence erupts in books, I have to take a breather.
Harlequin romances are too mushily romantic,
for I prefer my novels less sexually pedantic.
All-in-all you might have guessed I’ve little left to read
and so instead I write all day to satisfy my need

to hang out with a word or two that has not been written
by writers such as those above by whom I’ve not been smitten.
And though my poems aren’t edible or sexually explicit,
violent or airborne, I feel it is implicit
that I need an appointment with my therapist to see
if I can even stomach silly verses penned by me!

Prompt words are pinch, historic, appointment, volunteer, and flying. Image by Brendan Stephens on Unsplash.

Escargot

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Escargot

I am an ally of the truth, which lives the whole world over,
hiding beneath leaves of grass or hyacinths or clover.

A tiny snail detective, sliding slowly with no sound,
scoping out a food source over every edge and mound—

with its single jaw at work, nature’s innovation
cleans up all her messes with its constant mastication.

Cutter ants march by like time, disposing hour by hour,
of beauty we aren’t finished with, flower after flower,

but the snail goes gliding by, almost beyond detection,
eating everything in sight—less picky in selection.

From animal waste to fungus, and even other snails,
the appetite of gastropods seemingly never fails.

And then, ludicrous humans, knowing not what they do,
themselves devour these creatures who deign to dine on poo!

 

Prompt words today are snail,  innovation, detective, march, ally and clover.

Dreamworld

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Dreamworld

My dreams are irregular and I cannot control them.
Every night I enter them in order to patrol them.

Sometimes I feel marooned there, like a miner with no pick,
a writer with no pencil, a conductor with no stick.

Vanity is left behind. No room for it in dreams.
Life’s garment that we’ve sewn with care is ripped out at its seams.

It does no good to gripe or moan that you have lost control,
for dreams move us outside ourselves as though that is their goal.

On the outside looking in, our life becomes a role
in which we play ourself in our quest to find our soul.

Prompts today are dreams, irregular, maroon, gripe, miner and vanity.

Process of Elimination

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Process of Elimination

The child asked her grandpa to teach her how to spell,
and he could not deny her, though he knew good and well
that spelling class for him had been a different sort of Hell.

They had not been his forte, the chalk board and the book,
and so this was a challenge he timorously took. 
He had to find a method to help, by hook or crook!

He said to make a menu of all the words she sought
and he would make a list of all the spellings they were not—
a reverse teaching method that, thankfully, she bought! 

So, she gave her assent to all his ballyhoo,
discounting his misspellings of “tuthbrush”  “taribul” “hoo,”
on her route to finding  spellings that were new.

Thus she learned to overlook solutions that he sold her
in the loving ill-contrived way he sought to mold her
and used the dictionary, ruling out spellings he’d told her. 

Prompts today are: timorous, toothbrush, ballyhoo, assent, spell and menu.

Improving on the Masters

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Improving on the Masters

Surreptitiously, I raise the quill to make a thin gray line
to festoon the drawing that is not even mine,
then tuck my small utensil securely in my purse.
Nightly I make this journey, and nightly I rehearse

what I will say if caught at last, imagining the worse.

The art museum’s climate—chill and dry and dark
gives way to summer’s damp heat as I hurry through the park,
find my car and drive away, speeding ever faster
lest I be finally detected, improving on a master.

 

Prompt words today are festoon, surreptitiously, quill, utensil, thin, climate.

Love Objects

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Love Objects

While brides and grooms may view their love as something indivisible,

others find committed love as something they find risible.

With no direct object, love’s intransitive to some.
Instead of one love interest, they relish what may come.

Holy men may meditate on all that love can be,
while lesser men make light of it and take it on their knee

with a chortle and a crass approach that says they’ll have a look,
but don’t intend to be the one strung up on a hook,

captured and rebranded as a certain lady’s mister,
as he has equal feelings for her best friend and her sister.

Such men prefer to spread their light of love throughout the earth.
For them their love is dappled, a thing of fun and mirth.

Gurus, priests and bon vivants can’t settle on just one.
They’ll spread their love throughout their world before the day is done.

Prompt words are intransitive, meditate, risible (provoking laughter), chortle, look and dappled. Images of wedding scene, guru and partiers are from Unsplash.

Sunshine in Winter

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Sunshine in Winter

The sun casts its apricity against the bitter wind,
trying to convince us that it is our friend.
And though it cooks us in the summer, in winter, I admit,
when it warms us with its rays, I pray it will not quit.

Frozen in the wilderness, I resume my plea
that the rays of father Sol will manage to find me.
Once they desert their provenance, do those rays remember he
gave them clear direction to be sure to shine on me?

 

Prompt word are apricity (the warmth of the sun in winter, obsolete) cook, provenance, bitter, wilderness, resume.

Compositionally Befuddled

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Compositionally Befuddled

I’m not the beneficiary of your gift for words.
My acumen for spinning tales is simply for the birds.
When I type, the words roll out but they’re not all right.
Then the need to sort them out ends up as my plight.

I need a thesaurus for the simplest of statements.
I ask for enlargements when I really seek abatements.
I chafe under the rub of words, waiting for a rebuke.
Although I want a kumquat, I wind up with a cuke.

I could use some help most days when choosing words to keep.
Sometimes I have nightmares rifling through words in my sleep.
So when I err, be kind my friends, for I fear it’s true
that I have scant facility for what I choose to do!!!

 

Prompt words today are keep, type, rebuke, chafe, beneficiary and thesaurus.