Tag Archives: your daily word

Miser

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Miser

Money was his nemesis. He rued its silvery glow.
The piles of it below his bed had nowhere else to go.
For although he was a hoarder, always craving more of it,
his life was not made better even by just a bit.

His clothes were all in tatters. His house was falling down.
He had outstanding debts and bills in every store in town.
Not one thing about him suggested his success.
Every single outward sign only signaled distress.

He lived his life in misery. Inadequate. Alone.
Miserly and miserable, life stripped to the bone.
But when he finally passed away, his name slipped into lore.
He was the man who wasted life simply by wanting more.

Prompt words today are nemesis, inadequate, silvery, while and signal.

Well-Armed

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Well-Armed

Folks who are idolatrous
have deified the octopus.
The Durga of the watery world,
with her many arms unfurled,
when she suffers from upheaval,
she turns dangerous and evil.

Don’t underrate this ocean creature—
a lethal underwater feature.
Rankled, she exacts revenge,
her disturbed leisure to avenge,
for warfare is the medium
with which she relieves tedium.

A predator from dawn to dawn,
I could write an essay on
the sustenance she preys upon.
First they’re there and then they’re gone,
turned into impromptu feast
by this many-suckered beast.

This queen of the underworld
is lethal with her arms unfurled,
so if perchance you come upon her,
do not think that you can con her.
For if you try, I have a hunch
you might become her choice for lunch.

 

Durga is a fierce warrior goddess. She is depicted in Hindu art as riding on a lion or a tiger. She has many arms and is always brandishing a variety of weapons.

Prompt words today are octopus, essay, upheaval, rankle and medium. Image by Serena Repice Lentini on Unsplash. 

Update Fatigue

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Update Fatigue

I’m frenetically trying to dance to the beat,
determined that I don’t become obsolete.
I try not to repeat the historical me,
but I fear I’m as modern as I’m going to be.

This deluge of new things to learn and to do—
updates to look up and new settings to view—
leaves me no time for just simply living,
for petting the cat and for chatting and giving.

There’s no app for real life and so I’m less queasier,
finding my off-line life to be much easier.
Rules don’t change in a confusing whirr.
Positions don’t shift. Things remain where they were.

I’m simply not fit for the internet crew.
Too often I’m swamped over what I must do
to keep up with the changes and so I’m retiring.
All my accounts are slowly expiring.

Amazon, Facebook, WordPress and Skype
I’ll leave to the more agile changeable type
of online explorer who likes daily derangements,
frequent repositionings and rearrangements.

I’ll sit here on my porch that remains where it was
with my laptop unopened simply because
without viruses, hackers and updates and spam,
I can just rest and remain who I am!

 

 

So my instant updatesI think I’ll turn off.

imbue view queue cue do dew few hue Jew knew loo moo mew new pew rue sue too view woo eschew sue two too to view whew woo you zoo

Word prompts today are deluge, repeat,frenetic, obsolete and plea.

Upon Running into a Former Friend

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Upon Running into a Former Best Friend

Don’t give me cause to regret our reunion.
Don’t bring back to mind our former disunion.
Don’t lament my profession or cuss at my kids—
those actions that once put us into the skids—
dissolving our friendship and our former ties
when I’d had enough of your conniving lies.
Don’t inveigle or bemoan your lack of a pension.
Past times I’ve come through I won’t bother to mention.
And if you’ve a reaction and want to explode,
do me a favor. Take it on the road!!!

 

Prompt words today are inveigle, lament, reunion, cussed and reaction.

Looking Out, Looking In

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Looking Out, Looking In

I feel that Stuart’s decision to spend the afternoon with us is symbolic of his final acceptance of me after all these years. He’s been married to my friend Sarah for twenty-five years, helped raise her sons after their father’s death, but has always been suspicious of me. We have, however, spent the afternoon trading quips and now he is trying to show us the stars.

Sarah’s messing with the connection between the Smart TV and Stuart’s computer may serve to disunite their long union. He is frantically trying to undo whatever she has done so he can show us his video of the Grand Design Spiral Galaxy as well as a number of globular clusters .

Once he succeeds in showing it to us, our reactions to this amazing display are varied. He explains that the globular cluster comprised of hundreds of thousands of stars that is attached to our universe is perhaps the core of an old galaxy.

The present day galaxies he shows us are designated by a capital M followed by a number. Our reactions to this amazing display are varied. One of the galaxies looks like fireworks to my friend’s oldest son. I think M3 looks like the venation on a leaf and the other son sees M5 as a flower with the stem cut off. In the middle of M51 there is probably a black hole, Stuart tells us.

“Where does something go when it vanishes into a black hole?” I ask. “Matter can’t be created or destroyed, right?” That’s not especially true, says Stuart, who as a scientist is not accustomed to our level of ignorance about the workings of the Universe.

Nonetheless, he is patient in his attempts to show us the wider world, and this visit, I have begged him for a second nighttime viewing. The first time he showed me the world of our universe in his high powered telescope, I was amazed, feeling as thought I had perhaps had a new religious experience. As it is without, so it is within, I thought. Is there a black hole at our center? Is it going to swallow us? We are like two opposite ends of the spectrum, Stuart looking out and me looking within, each of us with a spot to fill that is suddenly a speck in a complex world.

Words of the day: venation, symbolic, frantic, disunite and reaction.

Pre-Trip Snafu

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After a packing frenzy, I finally fell asleep at 3 this morning, then got up at 5 to get ready for my ride  to the airport in Guadalajara to catch a flight to Houston and then to Minneapolis for a family reunion. I started writing this at 8 a.m. in Guadalajara. It is now 2:28 in the afternoon and I am in Houston waiting for my next flight.  I’ve spent an hour and a half  in the Guadalajara Airport waiting room, one hour waiting in the plane for a mechanical error to be fixed, two hours in the air, another hour and a half walking through passport control, customs, baggage claim, baggage recheck (I hope) and another few miles walking from the end of one concourse to the end of the other.

I hope my two hours of sleep last night  accounts for the fact that I absolutely cannot remember rechecking my 50 lb. checked bag after picking it up from the carousel here in Houston. I do remember lifting it off the carousel. I just can’t remember wheeling it though customs and rechecking it to Minneapolis! And I am not going to backtrack another 5 miles, so I may wind up in Minnesota with only my carry-on. The good news will be if this confusion is due to lack of sleep and not the onset of dementia.  This poem, however, relates the story of the beginning of my journey this morning as I sat in the waiting room at the departure gate for my flight from Guadalajara.

 

Pre-Trip Snafu

I have a special movie I’ve been saving to see.
It’s loaded on my laptop here, balanced on my knee
but I cannot watch it due to an oversight,
even though I have two hours left before my flight.

So I’m sitting in the airport feeling sort of lost.
I need to buy some earphones, no matter what the cost.
I knew I’d forget something even though I checked and checked,
but this egregious oversight I neglected to detect.

I penned a careful overview of what I knew I’d packed,
unpacked my bags and looked again to double-check each fact.
My boisterous friends requested that before I go
we celebrate my birthday, but I had to say no.

I was too busy packing , unpacking and repacking––
checking off the items to see what I was lacking.
Phone, computer, curling iron, hair dryer and comb.
I couldn’t think of anything that I was leaving home.

Of course it was inevitable something would go wrong,
and the realization was sure to come along
after I passed all the shops and five miles down the aisle,
weary of lines and walking. Ready to rest awhile.

No magazines to pass the time. My phone is out of juice.
No earphones to enjoy my flick. I guess I’ve cooked my goose.
Too late to remedy my lack, too far into my botch,
but real life’s all around me. I guess that I’ll just watch!

 

Prompt words are off, overview, boisterous, egregious and lost.

Rain, Rain

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Rain, Rain

The yearly rains extinguish the cauldron of the sun—
gunmetal sky, one wisp of cloud like a smoking gun.
When our prayers for rain to cease go without an answer,
once again, we voice vague threats to hire a necromancer.

A cosmopolitan traveller, rain roams the thirsty world
allaying drought and hunger with silver bullets hurled
to break apart hard-crusted earth, allowing plants to grow—
cornstalks pushing through the dirt, fresh fields of hay to mow.

With every living creature dependent on the rains,
still we cannot help but silently repeat the strains
of “Rain, rain, go away and come again some other day,”
when for weeks the rain pelts down from skies sunless and gray.

 

Prompt words today are cauldron, cosmopolitan, prayer and allay.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos on this site are by me.

Leftovers

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Leftovers

I’m feeling bodacious and pregnant with thought.
I’m ready to share everything that I’ve got.
Words weighty, bodacious and perhaps erogenous—
all of the parts of me rare or homogenous—
furnish the page when I’m in writing mode
and equipped to dig into the old mother lode.
I’m fertile with words and with erudition,
all my great plots coming into fruition,
but give me some room at this time of the day
for discarded words to get out of the way.
Don’t read this blog lest it turn you morose,
for you’ll trip over words if you follow too close.

Words abandoned and spurned lie below, broken-hearted—
disjointed phrases that I merely started—
I know it seems silly. Totally absurd,
but please give a small glance at a phrase or a word
that’s left over below, for words have feelings, too.
Steal a few for yourself from this discarded queue
if you should find any appealing to you
and write your own poem when you feel in the zone.
It’s the least I can do to try to atone
for my failure to launch them in poems of my own.
Otherwise, they will lie here abandoned, alone,
with no flesh around them. Words stripped to the bone!

Prompt words today are erogenous, pregnant, furnish, bodacious and mode.

       audacious                       bought          bode

                        tuition           darted      started.     do   glue      imbue

few                   hue   queue. 

                    cue rue stew               sue                 two

come into view                 whew            you                    zoo

verbose
code         goad lode             node rode           toad 
        phone              hone                alone stone
               shone tone    bone

 

Gleaning

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Gleaning

His precipitous departure and subsequent defection
belied earlier avowals of his most sincere affection.
As usual, his action in doing so was heartless—
his cruel revelation of his apathy most artless.

The opposite of nuance, he was blatant to the bone
as he crassly left her weeping to hit the road alone.
Doing her a favor, for he left the door ajar
for another suitor who had loved her from afar

from the time that they were children, but who had never spoken
who now seized this opportunity by handing her a token
that all of his affection he hoped he might expose:
a declaration of his love— single long-stemmed rose.

Carefully, he’d trimmed each  thorn, then ringed the single stem
with his mother’s engagement ring—a brilliant diamond gem. 
And so her recent heartbreak of being the one left
gave way to an elation so she felt much less bereft.

For unbeknownst to him, she had always felt the same,
although she had not shown it, for she feared the shame
of unrequited love if she had revealed how she felt,
but when she saw his token, her heart began to melt. 

And so they were soon married and the day their son was born,
her former love crested the hill, tattered and forlorn
to try to win the love back that he’d cast away so breezily,
only to find abandoned love was not won back so easily.

We learn from all life’s errors, both our own and those of others,
so I want to share this wisdom with my sisters and my brothers.
The moral of the story is be careful what you toss,
for a more farsighted lover may glean profit from your loss.


Prompt words today are nuance, subsequent, revealing, precipitous and heartless.

Glean: to gather leftover grain or other produce after a harvest.

 

Different Strokes

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Different Strokes

I believe I’ve lost my juju. I’m throwing in the towel.
If I were a mason, I’d be throwing in the trowel.
I’m too light on pragmatic and strong on fanciful.
I’m not achieving much but my life is never dull.
I’m terrible at numbers, organizationally lax—
a non-controversial drawback when it comes to paying tax.

I have a different point of view based on imagination
which works for writing poems but does not work for pagination
where “one” must always lead to “two” and “nine” must follow “eight.”
If I were timekeeper, the whole cosmos would run late.
The fact that I’m disorganized cannot be debated,
but it’s going way too far to say I’m addlepated.

The world needs many opposites to balance out each other.
For every north there is a south, for every dad a mother.
Sober’s stirred by silly and warm thaws out the cold.
Calm smooths out the erratic and meek balances the bold.
So if I tend toward fanciful, don’t issue an indictment.
There’s way too much reality. We need some more excitement.

 

Prompt words today are pragmatic, terrible, controversy, juju and towel.