Tag Archives: your daily word

Unsolicited Advice

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Unsolicited Advice

With buckets of advice and a blizzard of suggestions,
and prolific answers to all of life’s great questions,
he blusters and pontificates and tells us how to live
with advice he never follows, but which, nonetheless, he gives.

He imparts his wisdom to everyone he meets:
from how to run your business to your life between the sheets.
Advice on morals, love and sex (all in his domain)
make even brief encounters such a royal pain.

You know he’ll scratch his whiskers and open up his yap
and once again you will be caught in his vocal trap.
And so you’ve found that at first sight, you must avoid detection
by altering your footsteps to an alternate direction.

Prompt words today are whiskers, sheet, prolific, bluster, bucket and blizzard. Image by Roberto Quezada on Unsplash.

Kudzu

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Kudzu

By the statue of the satyr where the kudzu is the thickest,
I toil pulling roots out, and I swear I am the quickest.
Every place I see the vine, I vow that I will best it.
I remove  it from the soil, conquering it lest it
cover all my property from here up to the sea,
knowing if it had its way, that it would cover me!!!

Prompt words today are satyr, place, kudzu, toil, root and me.

School Reunion

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School Reunion

We’re grateful for the tiger in his ancient baseball shirt.
He’s still sliding into bases while we’re dishing out the dirt.

Non-Trumper against Trumper, human rightist against bigot,
all the ways we’ve grown apart, gushing from the spigot.

When the debate gets heated, he brings about a shift,
repeating old glories until we get his drift

and switch our conversation way back to the past
to all those high school memories that thankfully still last

and that turn the party back to what it should have been:
turning old friends back to what they all were way back when.

Prompts today are heater, party, grateful, tiger and shift. Image by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash.

Bad News

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Bad News

Life puts a bookmark on our pain
so we can visit it again.
Read its memory and absorb
the angst of our whole spinning orb.
Day after day, the pain is writ
in newspapers that carry it
to every mountaintop and shore.
As time advances, there’s always more.

Everywhere we share the pain.
Love is born, then lost again.
Countries advance but at the cost
of what another country’s lost.
The riches that the rich accrue
are for working man to rue.
One needs an exoskeleton
to protect him from the ill they’ve done.

War and pestilence  and greed
are given growth to by the need
of mankind to accrue still more
through exploitation and through war. 
There’s no escaping behind a door,
for daily, News just brings us more.

Prompt words today are exoskeleton, absorb, working, advance, lover, bookmark. Images from Unsplash.

Oops. Looks like the exoskeleton link didn’t work yesterday, so here it is again today: https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/rdp-wednesday-exoskeleton/

Computer Updates

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Computer Updates

Modern life is a rigmarole, day after day.
It radiates chaos for which you must pay.
If you’re hindered by change, then this isn’t your world.
Week after week, more updates are hurled
that change the position of all that you do.
How do I find “send?” I haven’t a clue!

They make no provision for those who are old
who have to remember instructions they’re told.
And just when they’ve memorized everything new,
all the things that they need have been placed out of view.
I find it uncouth that the programmers make
change after change just for change’s sake.

What is the purpose of transforming a word
into a symbol? I find it absurd.
Then putting it somewhere we don’t think to look
so we have to survey every corner and nook
just to perform a task we once found easy?
It makes us confused and a little bit queasy

that computer techs constantly accelerate
change so we’re always just out of date!!!!
Does it give them a lift and make them feel jolly
that they’re making their predecessors melancholy
for the old times when all the things found yesterday
were in the same place when looked for today????

Does anyone else keep getting the “Exchange Password Required” message dozens of times a day from Microsoft??? It is driving me crazy!!!!

Prompts for the day are radiate, hinder, rigmarole, couth, provision and melancholy. Click on the links to see what websites have provided the prompts.

 

Infirm Ingratitude

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(Click on photos to enlarge)


Infirm Ingratitude

Since I broke my arm and leg and am out of commission,
all my friends and neighbors have assumed it as a mission
to bring us over casseroles—two or three a day.
Way too many meals-on-wheels for us to put away.

Not one of us encouraged them, yet they seem to compete
in conjuring up mixtures that they feel that we should eat!
And though it’s rude to quibble over what it has elicited,
allow me to point out that all this food was unsolicited.

One concoction more has just wound up at my door
that I know my family is sure to abhor.
That the dogs and cats won’t eat it is our in-family joke. 
I’d put it down the drain, but our garbage disposal broke.

My husband says it’s wasteful to throw out all this food,
but I would have to chain up my picky-eater brood
and pry their clenched jaws open to get them to just taste
all this food my husband has said I shouldn’t waste!!!

Yet I’ve lately noticed that he, too, seems way less able
to consume the edibles delivered to our table.
So I’ve devised a plan and tonight is my rehearsal
for my plot to deal with leftover food dispersal.

My broken leg is slowing down the speed with which I dash
to sneak out after midnight bearing our inedible trash.
I lug the laden bags out with my one good arm,
hoping that my passing won’t trigger the alarm

to turn the backyard floodlights on to wake up all the neighbors
so that they can witness my furtive nightly labors.
Now it is my incentive to speedily get well
just to end this present culinary Hell!!!!

Prompts today are: chains, concoction, unsolicited, quibble, compete and encourage.

Winter Provisioning

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Winter Provisioning

The cows are in the pasture, plump but in the nude,
watching for their daily hay bales to be renewed.
My prestigious assignment is to drive the truck
while Daddy tips the hay bales off, for he has all the luck!
The cows think he’s their savior while I’m just the chauffeur.
So though my appearance does not cause a stir,
when they see his welcome face, they speed by in a blur
to break into the hay bales that my dad has spread,
and that is how in winter, daily, our cows are fed!!!

 

Prompts today are plump, renew, prestigious, watch, assignment and pasture. Image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.

Conjuring

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Conjuring

You are my homing pigeon, my wise old owl and dove.
My balsam for the pains of life, a well-remembered love.
Your presence is reality. It does not deviate.
You are a special part of life I can’t eradicate.
I breathe your name into the night and it draws you here.
Equal parts of holy and risque, you hover near.
And although your presence lasts mere minutes at a time,
it is time enough to prompt this laudatory rhyme!

 

Prompt words today are risque, name, balsam, deviate, reality and pigeon.

Wedding Ows

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Wedding Ows

Our wedding plans are complicated by the groom’s lasciviousness
that I find incongruous to his vows of  exclusivi”us”ness.
That marriage vows will tame him I fear will prove misleading.
He’ll make his heart available  as long as it is beating
to any passing lady who looks in his direction,
a fact which as you see has not escaped his bride’s detection.
You might think I’m a martyr to forgive this faithless phony,
but I am looking forward to the future alimony!

Prompt words today are complicated, available, lasciviousness, patient, incongruous and misleading. Image by Nathan Walker on Unsplash.

Musical Intercession

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Musical Intercession

If I delete the news from home and flip all my attention
to aspects of the world escaping major media’s mention—
consign my concentration to birdsong and the tide
that washes out world sorrows that I bear inside
and fills me with the opposite of what the news exports—
that awareness of perfection that is what nature reports—
my life becomes more peaceful as my mind is set at ease
by nature’s lullaby sung to the music of the bees.

 

Prompts today are delete, home, flip, consign, opposite, birdsong.