To glimpse the sun's arc
and the horizon,
I climbed into a book
at age four, like a Tarzan
when ants emerged as tigers,
and caterpillars, caymans.
Less than three feet high,
I swung from page to page
with savage cries, grasping words,
to tumble in a heap, bawling
if interrupted.

Decades later,
not much has changed;
I still plunge inside pages
to discover how much there is,
except my wild self learned
to rise again,
clutching the tomes.


Prompt: books or beyond them, or Buzz Lightyear (“To infinity, and beyond!”)

 

Two spoons, one dessert…
Do you know where we’re going
with stretched hands that yearn?


Prompt:haiku or very tiny poem

 

Body slouched forward
eyes twinkling like neon signs,
he waves from a face-size window.
I clutch my bag and hold his smile
wherever he goes.

But he'll come back again
with clangs and whistles
around the circle.
while I turn into a pillar
graying after him.

No platforms here, just hope
tuning into railroad songs
and flashy red wagons
hissing to a stop,
at the Choo-Choo in the mall.

Prompt: train ride


 

Eyes red, tongue dry, your bones whine.
Hovering over toy towns invisible in darkness,
you crave home, your bed, your sleep,
a fresh apple and peach.

Guy in the next seat snores; his eyelids twitch.
Girl across the aisle sips from a plastic bottle.
Her gulps reach your ears, and under the overhead light,
a woman, yawning, holds a book upside down.

Attendant, too sweet, too green, dims the lights
now shining like dusty candles.
You listen to the engine sing falsettos to the ocean
and hope the pilot is not blind drunk.

Sleepless, you flounder in thoughts or obscenities
as memories infest, shoulders ache, feet hurt,
and you still keep vigil over nerves soaring
on extended wings, yours and those of the plane.


Prompt: exhaustion

 

My lines, trained vines on trellis heart-to-heart
Words tumble out of my pen yet not art

Akin to a bug I crawl on new plants
Wet with changing moods April rains impart

Seeking for nectar, seeking for love's smile
Sun slides away, the day begins to part

Waiting for May, when I can fly or fall
And past will be a dream as I restart

A Houdini, no. This poem is the mind
But, after canes and crutches, it's the heart


Prompt: April showers, May flowers (but no actual clichés) (maybe a ghazal!)
 

”Don’t you want to see your daughter?
Wait, I’ll get her.”
”I don’t need to. Just give me my things.”

But there I was, so tiny,
when Papa didn’t see me
hiding behind the large colorful ruffles
of Altagracia’s dirndl skirt.

The cruelest month when all of us lost,
its name I can’t recall.
It was in summer sometime.

.
Prompt: the cruelest month

 

on a heart-shaped plot
a lilac-tinted lily
with soft-scented grace


Prompt: Easter
 

on a heart-shaped plot
a lilac-tinted lily
with soft-scented grace


Prompt: Easter
 

"Busy giddy minds / with foreign quarrels,”
a perception like a present of prophecy,
as when time comes, Prince Hal obliges
toward France, for battalions to march
quietly at night and swords to rattle
to keep folks occupied at all costs.

Good advice from a dying king
still heeded in our time of no blades
but drones and exploding gifts
from the sky, as it must be why
three wars are keeping us engaged
to make us forget long shadows
falling on wheels sunk in a mud hole.


Prompt: Shakespeare’s birthday

 

So many freeways…
Going away,
coming home,
feelings leaking
from tire traces,
as I sip from cans,
eat out of paper bags,
curl around pillows,
and write free verse
the way I wish,
in my free-flow life.


Prompt: freedom, free with purchase, or other irony of the word “free”

 

Chance, the solitary tyrant,
unwraps his cloak
after passing me by,

while I, in my current repose
open one indifferent eyelid
and shrug my shoulders,

but as my public duty,
I have brought him
to court, today.

My deposition is: chance stalks
to bump off desperate victims
fearing insignificance

as they wait for him, sleepless,
to vanish inside
the echo of his footsteps.

Chance, I declare,
deserves lifetime incarceration
to free Liberum Arbitrium from its spell.


Note: Liberum Arbitrium: free will (in philosophy)

Prompt: justice or a gavel

 

Yesterday, my neighbor snuffled,
in tears, on bad news,
her son in an accident
in a faraway land.
She wept quietly in acceptance,
asking nothing.

Next, my car did not start
for conked-out battery.
I screamed.
Such injustice
my canceled appointments!

Battery, replaced;
son, impossible.
Scream, the bigger noise,
hump on my back.

prompt: hump of the week

 

It flourishes suspended,
hanging
no water, no roots,
just air...

Such hideous independence...

Not the same for me.
Poems don't come
from the air,
and I covet kudzu.


Prompt: well gone dry

Kudzu is air fern, as in the photo
 

Junk science: steroids for golden gloves
Making faces: politicians for votes
Food innovation: chocolate pastrami...

Following the trend,
I kid you not, at my age,
I'm out to learn plumbing
and auto mechanics
after butting heads
with my daily life.

prompt: you've got to be kidding!

 

Class mother, 1982,
in other words, chaperone
to those half my size
with tiny dramas and shouts of glee
sighting big waves
made for surfers, not us.

Kids ask to wet their feet
One teacher says yes, the other no.

They turn to the least likely judge, me.
I nod yes for twinkles on small faces.
A shriek...and they're all in brine...
My son, leading, as if by accident,
falls in the water, his uniform and all,
followed by the majority.

Wasn't this field trip meant to be
a search for whelk and clam shells?

Such stage show, picking off,
stripping, laying on the sand to dry
kids and clothes...
The teachers discuss PTA reaction,
but my head is down
as I write on wet sand
my thanks to open ocean and whitening waves,
for the thaw of ice in living.

By the way, my son is still the same
as years and joys amass.


Prompt: free-choice or take a field trip somewhere and respond to that in a poem


 

In the silence of morning, kitchen door creaks,
dishes clang in chorus, coffee pot steams,
recall wakes up urged by the cries
of David's grandchild next door, and inside me,
I hug you just like the time
you tumbled into my arms, complaining,
"A giant from first grade hit me!"

Thinking of you quiets my thoughts,
masking the news sounds of TV,
visions of bombing raids,
incinerated towns, bodies, who kills who,
who messes up the president's plan,
who puts rotten strawberries
in the bottom of supermarket baskets
and all missed chances.

Oh, once more, this renewed uproar!
I focus on the middle of my brows,
as Buddhists do, so you to return again,
for your quiet face to calm me cell by cell.


prompt: being quiet


 

No sweetener in this one
and numbers grovel, quizzical lines pop up,
signs point to additions, equaling
nothing I can grasp, and accountant’s pen,
without consulting any instruction manual,
doodles, drawing traces, right or wrong,
as he exposes last year’s past on paper
for vampiric voyeurs.

I wait with spoon in hand to stir the pot,
but fruits fall apart and jam boils over.

If I could--instead--I would play
the lyre and sing to IRS, setting what I own
in words and tunes, but that wouldn’t make
much of an impression since my offering
would not be the IRS jam. So, by now,
I’m taxed all right out of my mind.
Still, I muse, someday, I may envy the gallantry
of a knight putting a levy on those who squeeze
what little’s left, out of me.


prompt: your take on taxation this year

 

No sweetener in this one
ans numbers grovel, quizzical lines pop up,
signs point to additions, equaling
nothing I can grasp, and accountant’s pen,
without consulting any instruction manual,
doodles, drawing traces, right or wrong,
as he exposes last year’s past on paper
for vampiric voyeurs.

I wait with spoon in hand to stir the pot,
but fruits fall apart and jam boils over.

If I could, instead, I would play
the lyre and sing to IRS, setting what I own
in words and tunes, but that wouldn’t make
much of an impression since my offering
would not be the IRS jam. So, by now,
I’m taxed all right out of my right mind.
Still, I muse, someday, I may envy the gallantry
of a knight putting a levy on those who squeeze
what little’s left out of me.

prompt: your take on taxation this year

 

After clouds exploded
with pomp and boom
smashing into one another
in a chain reaction stretching
through an incandescent sky
like thousand tongues on fire,
one lonely palm
with spiked fronds
twitched and tottered
in the storm.

What did the tree feel,
seeing that flash
the last second
before lightning hit?

Were it possible,
even a skin graft
would be useless now.

prompt: thunder and lightning

 

An intrepid snake slithered
over my feet, then coiling,
lifted its head to observe
me snapping cloud pictures,
palm trees with shredded leaves,
and my neighbor David’s pinwheels.

Such moments of grace, whirling
twirling to the tune of camera clicks…
Wasn’t I supposed to scream?
Wasn’t it supposed to slink away?
Now, how can I call snakes odious
after one of them with friendly vibes,
radiating gentle curiosity,
observed me? And
who says forked tongues
only spit out poison?

the theme of “supposed to”