Autumnal severance
season’s flashing tonality
present past present future
the shin hurt of childhood quarrel
aging fruit and jarring tumbler
last year’s fashion muffler, tomorrow’s cinder
moth-eaten “do my bones look big in this?” sweater
witch’s brew of prescription medicines
growing old is time’s obscurer
a flash of autumnal red
like twinkling stars
fade and fall
For Sammi's Day 6 ("witches brew") and Day 7 ("Do my bones look big in this?")
Comedian Charlie Berens on “Four Types of People at the State Fair:” if you don’t recognize these dudes, you haven’t been to a state fair.
Obviously.
Enjoy!
After an absence of weeks from your midst, my first return post is a rant. Forgive me. I’ve just been reading about the barbaric custom of bacha bazi which is practiced in parts of the Mideast, northwestern Pakistan and most ubiquitously and flagrantly in Afghanistan. As a 2015 New York Times article reported and Tablet magazine reminds us today, during their twenty-year tenure there, our soldiers were told by their “woke” military commanders to disregard the practice among their Afghan “allies” even as it occurred under their very noses. One Special Forces officer was fired for preventing the rape of an Afghani boy. What an amoral, self-serving, dictatorial sham is the leadership in our country and the world! Meanwhile, we pray for the 15,000 Americans who are trapped in Afghanistan right now. May God help them, and the Afghani women and children.~d
Patronized by our inferiors
Elitists compromised by their behaviors
Say don’t you know the bacha bazi
“Dancing” little boys raped by Afghan “allies”
So we could stay spending our dollars
On defense contractors greasing legislators
To turn a blind eye to “indigenous customs”
Children enslaved to cowards
“Allies” rebranded as refugees
To soil the land with fresh blood of their victims
Here in the streets where Harley-Davidsons
Ride on the winds of freedom from oppression.
Let the monsters stay with the warlords of Pakistan
Or Qatar, or UAE with CCP camps of Uyghurs
Don’t let the elitists tell you “better.”
raindrops in millions
falling on petals
in thirsty gardens
collecting in puddles
for children to play in
drenching the sidewalks
and a lone walker
without umbrella
dancing and singing
a tune so uncanny
it chases a rainbow
through clouds
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: 39 words using “uncanny”
I see you, Kant, you pietist old goat,
thinking to save my faith apart from reason,
old toad, when a frog could have told you
like Kermit did, that phenomena be damned
it’s the noumena that we long for
not what our five senses perceive
but what we’re born knowing
that rainbows begin here but end there
that there are monsters under beds
and angels glowing near us
that what we can’t see is more powerful
than what we do see
that God is good and we’re not
so there’s an infinite gulf between us
only God himself could bridge
and, Kermit, that’s why there’s so many
songs about rainbows.
A word prompt to get your creativity flowing this weekend. How you use the prompt is up to you. Write a piece of flash fiction, a poem, a chapter for your novel…anything you like. Or take the challenge below – there are no prizes – it’s not a competition but rather a fun writing exercise. If you want to share what you come up with, please leave a link to it in the comments at Sammi’s #WWP.
With Utmost Gravity
It’s a conundrum
A knotty problem
I wrinkle my brow
Wink at the crow
Say a “Hail Mary”
And still it’s with me
The confounding notion
That this earth in motion
Might become idle
Like a spent dreidel
Then weightless I’ll wander
Out . . . yonder.
This is not a mirror
Ground silica back-silvered
A labyrinth to unravel your soul
But splintered fragmentation
Of all your expectations
A story to re-glue and emboss.
This is not a mirror
Portal to another world
Left-handed universe
Turnabouts of phantoms
A touch on your shoulder
That welt on your cheek.
This is not a mirror
It is an owl’s feather
A rat’s tail, a torn page
Blood of jilted lover
The sigh of an empress
Dethroned by endless war.
This is not a mirror, a mirror, a mirror.
For Dverse, Mish's Poetics: Object Poems "This is not ..."
Click on Mr. Linky and join in!
Lisa of Tao Talk asks: In the shadows, did you ever secretly wish you were someone else, either as a child or an adult? My answer? I can’t say that I have but like so many children, I’ve often wondered what it was like to be the big creatures of the earth, including the now extinct dinosaurs. Many of them seem like gentle giants, elephants for example. Others strike terrors, like lions and tigers and bears, oh my! But it’s the fantasy creatures that overtake a child’s imagination, like unicorns and griffins and flying horses and magical birds, like the phoenix. Underwater, it’s the music of the whales which seem to have dominion over most of the vast recesses of the world. They live in a universe of their own, unfettered and majestic.
There’s an ocean of energy in swelling tides
dancing in atoms and planets and stars
but most of it’s not in the surface above
it rides in the universe of the heart’s designs
wanting the freedom of the sea’s vast lands
where Atlantis lies buried and canyons unfold
and gravity means little to eyes that glow.
Something is missing in the world above,
something that my mind’s eye sinks below
where dreams turn to dust and songs to wails
and gates are just openings to walls within walls.
So give me the sea and the skin of a whale
and tumble me down to the music below.
Under the glare of warehouse light
steel-eyed commerce crisscrossing
vaulted space above while below
we, in well-trammeled lanes, forage
with brandished carts loaded,
swallow claustrophobic desire
stretch Ali Baba eyes to needful things
as La-Z-Boys race past
iWant-slick bling-gadgetry —
only to be stared down by a winged unicorn:
unflurried pinkness, nestled wonder
in small chubby arms.
Sammi's Weekend writing Prompt #180
Canoop! the sound of your loop-tee-do
Enough! the slough of your despondency
Wooditch! the whinge of your panicky
The meteor’s coming ‘ere election day!
Cannip the conniption fit, buddit the funk
Swallow the glut of slubbish bilocracy
Gnash, says the prophet Neal deGrasse
Tyson, we’ll die in a blaze ‘ere election eve!
O Meteor of space! O Deliverer of grace!
You’ll spare us, ‘ere you dare us, with crater
Dustiferous, injurious, deleterious bringer
Of sweltering doom ‘ere we galood election gloom!
Come the third of November, we’ll never remember
Who’s Harris, Who’s Donald, What’s Joe Biden hidin’?
We won’t know a thing when the meteor’s oncomin’
O’er helter-election-welter, combustin’ election eve!
For Peter Frankis's NTB "Let your words ring out" at dVerse. Check out Mr. Linky for more poems with "with a focus on sounds"
This Jolly Beggar 