Relationships – This Jolly Beggar

The Accidental Rose

Seeing a rose, I once said that we stand out like that, red on green, and you reply, tongue-in-cheek, you mean like an ambulance at 3 AM in a Mississippi swamp and I shut up, crushed, like you’d said we were an accident that had been waiting to happen, as if crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end, just a screeching of brakes, a clang of metal, the jolting of bones, and then the long drawn out police report and insurance claims, a ledger of rights and wrongs, and the spindrift pages in the moonlit night where my heart spills and the nightingale vies with a shrike impaled on a thorny bush that ought to have a bloom, a rose, while someone, no one, looks for a medic to resuscitate the dead in an ambulance at 3 AM.

For Cee's FOTD 
and dVerse's Prosery where Merril asks us to use a line from a Jo Harjo poem, “Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end,” to write a 144-word piece of prose. Click on Mr. Linky and join in!

More Arms to Reach You

If I had more arms to reach You
Would that help? But You say,
Two will do now
To reach my neighbor.

Eyes upward, arms outward: Happy Lord’s Day

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
John 15:12

Check out more flower photography at Cee’s FOTD challenge for April 25, 2021

The Only Way

Word Count: 100; Genre: Realism

The Only Way

“You’re in my world now. What do you think of it?”
“Like a fish out of water. Like I stand out in an unpleasant way, like I don’t belong.”
“Does that offend you? Want out?”
“Not really. I mean, it’s not your world I want. It’s you.”
“To know me is to know the world I came from. You understand?”
“I do. But you’re still missing the point. It’s you that makes my idiotic world and yours worth knowing. I couldn’t care less otherwise.”
“So our ‘love covers a multitude of sins’, in both our worlds?”
“It’s the only way.”

Rochelle Wisoff-Fields very kindly invites us to join the Friday Fictioneers in their weekly creative quests of a hundred words or less prompted by a photo.

Click on the frog to join the party!

Curtain Fall

Rochelle Wisoff-Fields invites us weekly to join the Friday Fictioneers in their creative quests of a hundred words or less, prompted by a photo. Click on the frog to join in!

Curtain Fall

He was a wandering musician, traversing continents, twanging on his banjo, a wordless witness to a universal language.

No one knew his origins.

Still the story is told that he came from another world. And one came seeking him whose betrayal had left him mute. Powerless to make him return, she took with her the memory of his youthful fingers dancing on strings, his eyes expressive of no other purpose than seeking nameless tunes of faithless love.

Raindrops fall like tears on tree-trunk curtains, ethereal remnants of her departure from this world.

In a midnight café, a tuneful banjo plays.

The Old Man and the Sea

Rochelle Wisoff-Fields invites us weekly to join the Friday Fictioneers in their creative quests of a hundred words or less, prompted by a photo. Click on the frog to join in!

The Old Man and the Sea

“Bleu, bleu, l’amour est bleu,” crooned the old man beneath his cap
Remembering the promise he had failed to keep as a lad of nineteen
He stood before the sea, and his heart surged piteously
Remembering the promise he had failed to keep as a man of thirty-two
“Comme l’eau, comme l’eau qui court,” sang he, wading into surf
Remembering the promise he had failed to keep as a cavalier of fifty-four
His blood ran cold as a sea-voice joined in
“Fou comme toi et fou comme moi,”
then down he went
in a sea-embrace
till he sang
no
more.

Continue reading “The Old Man and the Sea”

Text: ICYMI

(A doggerel in the voice of a cantankerous correspondent; Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt #197 using the word “call” in a prose or poem of exactly 41 words.)

Spatial Encounter

I am not averse to reimaginations
Given you walked out of my conversation
As a noetic effect of its distillation

I am not chained to inharmonious juxtapositions
When salubrious angels gather in celebration
Of a desire prayed and given manifestation

I am simply thankful for your gravitation
Towards me, bindingly, irradiate sub-atomic fusion
Where once I envisioned only solitary annihilation

Yet this I wonder, and this in never-ending fascination
How in moments your eyes gray meet my brown it’s recreation
Of a space-time-matter continuum of conflagration

For dVerse's "Poetics:Look into my Eyes"
Click on Mr. Linky and join in!

Not While I’m Eating

Please no histrionics at the dinner table
Wait till we’re on a flight to Tahiti
Maybe the opera house in Sydney,
The Tower of London with Yeoman Warders,
On River Street in Savannah, Georgia,
Somewhere in Portland or Philadelphia,
Just wait till I finish my dinner in peace.

Sammi's Weekend Writing Prompt #181
word prompt: "histrionics"; word limit: 48

Letter to No Lycidas

Genre: Poetry 
Word count: 100 
written for Rochelle's Friday Fictioneers 
click on the friendly frog for more tales of a hundred words or less 
& join the fun!

Letter to No Lycidas

No Lycidas are you, my son,
no watery bier nor desert grave
holds you. But in the crisp
of autumn air, your countenance
lights a distant town, another’s home
a place where you from me remain.
Yet I wonder, pray one day I’ll see
you striding back to see me here;
that one day that old mailbox
will find you on a daily chore
or whether the woods beyond will gape
to hear your lusty songs of praise
to the God of miracles and a Son
who freeing the soul from evil design
heals faultless the sutures of the mind.

Before You Go

I could feel her soft, wrinkled hand tightening on mine. I don’t know how long we stood before she finally spoke.

“I was looking out that window over the sign. I saw your grandfather’s mother kill mine. Just because she wasn’t the same color. It’s been seventy years now. It feels like just yesterday.”

I got my tongue working. “Grandma, how could you marry him?”

She turned, soft brown eyes wet with tears. “It wasn’t easy but love won. Hate lost. You’ll be going off to college soon. You won’t forget that, will you?”

“Like the sign says, Grandma, ‘NOPE’!”

word count: 100 
written for Rochelle's Friday Fictioneers
click on Rochelle Wisoff-Fields's hand-drawing of the frog 
for more tales of a hundred words or less.
And join the fun!