Notes on a Serviette

Sunday, June 23, 2013

547 : Liar! Liar! Pants on Fire!

Sunday Whirl (Wordle #114) presents a list of words

that we must incorporate in a writing piece.

The words this week are:

tracks, edge, files, lie, mess, complex,

gas, forest, still, pale, answers, class

Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!

Children are such terrible liars.

The lies they tell are so transparent

And create a mess of loose ends:

Wrong tracks,

Muddy tracks,

Back tracks,

Side tracks,

That lead you beyond

The edge of credulity.

But still, they would have you believe them

Even though they fail the basic

If-this, then-that test:

What? A dog ate your homework?

Shouldn’t you have a dog, then?

They file a complex forest of loose ends

That defy explanations

And answers to any questions

Breed only more bizarre explanations

That make the first pale by comparison.

Oh, I see, an imaginary dog.

But they are a gas, a joy to watch,

And in a class of their own.

Adults, on the other hand—

Well, they are no better.

---

546 : Wrinkles

One Single Impression has the prompt "Wrinkle".

Wrinkles

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind

than it does on the face.

- Michel de Montaigne

On the rollercoaster of life,

Where, on some days, dramas build

In unpredictable way’s,

Others are, most thankfully, joy filled:

We’re bent by the events we’re sent.

And stay crinkled, not immaculate.

While life passes by, both joy and strife,

Wrinkles just accumulate.

---

545 : The Crystal Ship

Imaginary Garden with Real Toads asks us

to incorporate a Jim Morrison song title into a writing.

The Crystal Ship

The crystal ship that we live on,

That carries us from when were born,

Is a tough but brittle sloop

That seldom tells us what to do,

Or the course to set our bearings to,

Or what currents we can count on

And leaves us there to dwell upon

The nagging demons who also crew

The crystal ship.

The winds we catch are not foregone,

We have little choice but sailing on,

Some days the skies are clear and blue,

Others, storms we must pass through,

As each one of us travels upon

The crystal ship.

---

Saturday, June 22, 2013

544 : Buddhist Soup

Haiku Heights has the prompt "Lunch".

This time of the year we produce some stunning

but unrepeatable soups from leftovers.

Buddhist Soup.

Bowls of warming soup,

Made from sundry leftovers,

Reincarnated.

---

Friday, June 21, 2013

543 : Life

Life

A balancing act --

The heart will pull you one way,
The brain, the other.

---

Thursday, June 20, 2013

542 : The Zombie Army

Three Word Wednesday requires participants

to use the three words of the week in a composition.

The words this week were phantom, agile and flaccid.

The Zombie Army

The convulsive genital sneeze

Propels the phantoms of mankind,

Only semi human but still determined;

Relentless, agile and blind.

Billions storm the battlements

But only one will have succeeded.

The rest are just left to die;

Superfluous and unneeded.

The commander of the forces

Stops once his goal’s obtained,

And slips into a peaceful sleep

Contented, flaccid and, well, drained.

---

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

541 : Post Hoc

Post Hoc

The victors create the records

To ensure their place is set.

The losers cower from the blows

But they will not forget.

Both sides construct the next divides

And so history is altered.

A fence constructed afterwards

To prove the horse has bolted.

---

540 : The Enigma

Haiku Heights has the prompt "Enigma"

She smiles so sweetly,

Is so kind in many ways.

Why am I bleeding?

---

Sunday, June 16, 2013

539 : The Professor Expounding.

Mad Kane has a regular limerick challenge.

She provides the first line,

the rest is up to us.

A professor would often expound

A theory, long proven unsound.

He thought a man oughta

Swim well underwater

But sadly, in trying, he drowned.

---

538 : The Voices

Sunday Whirl (Wordle #113) presents a list of words

that we must incorporate in a writing piece.

The words this week are:

moonshine, anything, scoop, cave, shatters, wake,

giggle, cut, load, sense, splits, crazy, chattering

The Voices.

The moonshine plays on the meadow,

As I lie in bed, awake.

A thousand voices chattering,

Leaving questions in their wake.

In my sombre cave of fat and bone,

A host of goblin’s whispers churn,

They then overload my senses,

Giggle at my concern.

They dance a crazy, frantic dance

Where anything can be,

They scoop and dive and then contrive

To cut up my sanity.

The alarm splits the revelry from the dawn,

Shattering the dreams gone by.

So now I recall that I couldn’t sleep

But can’t remember why.

---

537 : Family Pet

A family is a unit composed not only of children

but of men, women, an occasional animal,

and the common cold.

- Ogden Nash

Family Pet

Ogden say the family unit

Includes the common cold;

It seems to fight all attempts

To evict it from the fold.

It mocks.

(And you can’t just change the locks).

So, hence,

Resigning to our lot,

We formally adopted it

And named the bludger “Snot”.

---

536 : Head Lights

I'm not a big user of small form poems, such as the Haiku.

So it's hard to tell where these came from.

At 5am, it's hard to tell where anything comes from.

Head Lights

A slip of the tongue,

A word said without thinking,

Shines light inwards.

◊

Inadvertently,

By way of careless comments,

We reveal too much.

◊

Off the cuff comments

Are windows into the heart

And reveal the belief.

---

535 : Words as Knives

Three Word Wednesday requires participants

to use the three words of the week in a composition.

The words this week were chuckle, evil and serrated.

Words, as knives.

The tongue

Can be exceedingly sharp,

And, ironically, blunt.

Words cut deeply.

While they are not always evil,

It is nothing to chuckle about either.

The cut is deeper,

More raw,

Than your serrated fish-knife

Or the one for your daily bread.

It bleeds tears.

And tends to get infected.

---

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

534 : Parole

Parole

Enclosed and confined by the walls,

Some of my own making,

I struggle in the bleak landscape

Of acting,

Some say faking.

Being there.

But my needs lie elsewhere:

To escape the artificial night

And, with a sense of relief, it falls

And I step into the light.
.

---

533 : Illusions

Theme Thursday has the prompt 'Destination'.

Illusions

Destinations are a mirage,

Forever out of reach.

Some say Death’s a destination,

But usually folk that preach.

So, why

Do people even try?

But on they go,

Boldly, and intend,

With their temporal entourage,

To find the rainbow’s end.

---

Monday, June 10, 2013

532 : The Secret Fertilizer

Mad Kane has a regular limerick challenge.

She provides the first line,

the rest is up to us.

The Secret Fertilizer

A woman was holding a rose

And the prize that it won in the shows.

And no-one suspected

Her success was connected

With the spot where she buried her beaus.

---

Sunday, June 09, 2013

531 : Nocturne III – Intermission

There seems to be a nocturne theme in the blogosphere at present.

Imaginary Garden with Real Toads asks us to write a Nocturna.

(9 lines, decasyllabic, aba cbc dbd.)

Intermission

Bells, vespers for the closing of the day

Herald the coming of a time of rest

And present a chance to clean the slate.

An important lesson that should be drawn:

Our problems, too, traverse the night refreshed

To reappear with the coming of the dawn.

Through such loose ends, countless sheep are numbered;

Far better if the issues are addressed

To then start the new day, unencumbered.

---

Saturday, June 08, 2013

530 : Who's Manning the Watch?

Sunday Whirl (Wordle #112) presents a list of words

that we must incorporate in a writing piece.

The words this week are:

park, page, yard, status, shimmering, spill,

spewing, thunder, rest, curb, jets, steps

Concurrently, dVerse has the prompt of twins, or entwined poems.

Who's Manning the Watch?

In the shimmering heat, late in the day.

Small dots appear on the horizon.

Birds of prey, perhaps.

On its pages, real and electronic,

the media is spewing indignation by the yard

at the perceived injustices it deigns to see:

The marital status of a footballer, for example,

Or the forlorn hope of a cabinet spill.

Or the washing machine repairman

who short-changed a housewife in Bentleigh.

What to do? Print a picture of a puppy or two.

Meerkats are also good.

What? The price of parking your car has gone up?

Crisis. Civilization, as we know it, is collapsing.

The dots in the sky have changed.

Barely perceptively, they are getting larger.

Suddenly, (these things are not linear),

they are very, very large indeed.

And then with a thunderous roar,

recede to dot like status on the other horizon.

Jets. Attack fighters. Killing machines with cross-hairs.

Behind them, they leave the dead. No trial for them.

No chance to explain.

Just dead.

Summary justice, administered to curb dissent.

But, of course, it fails.

The media are outraged

A football coach wont resign;

The pack stake out his home and nag.

The railway crossing that was ‘an accident waiting to happen’

but oddly not news prior to the accident,

The council that wont take steps to protect

the feather-footed rock-pecker from picket fences,

A nude in an art show rouses the fears of art-loving paedophiles

(where were the wowsers in Reuben’s time?)

Of course we have a page 3 girl.

She’s not offensive.

Our readers expect it.

In a courtroom, heavily guarded,

a small soldier sits,

surrounded but very much alone.

He too had seen the cross hairs,

seen the aftermath of remote diplomacy,

and had responded as any decent person should.

And will suffer for it for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile the media is in an uproar.

Apparently daylight saving is causing curtains to fade.

---

Friday, June 07, 2013

529 : Nocturne II

This is a rework of the previous poem.

I had tried to do an hexasonnetta, a form

which uses 6 syllables per line, and found it clunky.

I have reworked it in a 8/6 pattern, keeping the original rhymes,

and am much happier with it.

Nocturne II

The evening twilight is bringing

A stillness, without grace.

No fleecy jacket can erase

A shiver that is tingling,

And the birds have stopped their singing—

It seemed so out of place.

As the light is quickly fading,

The sense is of despair,

A numbing chill hangs in the air,

And shadows are parading

A sadness that’s all pervading,

It’s more than most can bear.

And, with the fading of the light,

The darkness of the night.

---

Thursday, June 06, 2013

528 : Nocturne

Imaginary Garden with Real Toads had the prompt 'Nocturne'.

Poetic Bloomings challenged us to use the Hexsonnetta form.

Didn't quite get there on the trimeter requirement but close. Ish.

Nocturne

The twilight is bringing

A stillness, without grace.

No jacket can erase

A shiver that is tingling.

The birds have stopped their singing—

It seemed so out of place.

The light is quickly fading,

The sense is of despair,

A chill hangs in the air,

While shadows are parading,

The sadness is pervading,

It’s more than most can bear.

With the fading of the light,

The darkness of the night.

---

Wednesday, June 05, 2013

527 : The Postcard

Poetry Jam has the prompt 'Vacation",

The work must fit on the back of a postcard.

The Postcard

My dearest Mother and Papa,

Greetings from a stool in the bar:

I’ve been living on beer

As the waters smells queer

And the food tastes vaguely of tar.

The coffee’s as thick as cold honey

And my bowels are decidedly runny.

But the weather’s been fine…

And there’s this girl in room nine…

Please transfer over more money.

---

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

526 : Fundamentally Wrong.

Theme Thursday has the prompt 'Evolution'.

I think we were supposed to be creative and

do something other than the obvious.

But the obvious can be very satisfying.

Fundamentally Wrong.

“There are no apes in our design”

Is the Fundamental case;

They say that we should not forget

Eden was our birthing place.

Since then

We haven’t changed again.

And yet,

With commendable resolve,

Their strategies to hold that line

Continue to evolve.

---

525 : The Crime Scene

Mad Kane has a regular limerick challenge.

She provides the first line,

the rest is up to us.

The lad, Jack, was feeling quite ill,

After fetching some water with Jill.

In the original rhyme,

They glossed over a crime:

He was pushed, not fell, down the hill.

---

524 : Feeling quite ill

Mad Kane has a regular limerick challenge.

She provides the first line,

the rest is up to us.

A fellow was feeling quite ill

After eating his wife’s junket, until

He dropped dead on the spot,

And she inherited the lot:

Where there’s a whey there’s a will.

---

Sunday, June 02, 2013

523 : Words

Based on a Facebook meme that used the above image and said

"The tongue has no bones but is strong enough to break a heart.

Be careful with your words."

Words

While the heart can take a beating

From the vagaries of fate,

It’s words that cause the greatest pain

And they never quite abate.

They cut—

Deeply, crudely,

But again,

And again,

They reassert,

Rallying to the cause,

Repeating the original hurt.

---

522 : A Brief Blooming

Sunday Whirl (Wordle #111) presents a list of words

that we must incorporate in a writing piece.

The words this week are:

vault, halls, swirl, crave, throat, wind,

limbs, nimble, prairie, rapture, train, each

A Brief Blooming

The wind swirls across the prairies,

The land is strangely still.

A wolf clears its throat and howls,

It echoes through the hills.

Hunter gatherers, the nomadic tribes,

Travel for feeding’s sake,

They are necessarily nimble

As survival is at stake.

Cities appear, with their streets and halls,

Their limbs are clothed and warm;

Food is farmed and plentiful,

There is shelter from the storm.

They keep the wealth they cannot eat

In vaults beneath the floor,

Each sold on the rapture of novelty

And taught to crave for more.

Growth is the mantra of this world,

But we’re stealing from the larder,

Come the day when it all runs out,

Our life will get much harder.

Hunter gatherers, the nomadic tribes,

Travel for feeding’s sake,

Necessarily they are nimble

As survival is at stake.

The wind swirls across the prairies,

The land is strangely still.

A wolf clears its throat and howls,

It echoes through the hills.

---

521 : Seen and Unseen

dVerse Poets has the prompt 'Bathroom'.

Seen and unseen

In the steam and falling water,

There’s a body standing bare;

There’s a reflection that displeases—

He ignores the image there.

Showing a vision most unwanted,

He views the mirror as unkind.

It doesn’t match the hero, reflected

In the steam room of his mind.

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