Friday, June 15, 2012

Nightmare for Toads



Night time:
urgent squeaking,
naked tail flicks, thrashes,
whisker-twitch, nail-click down the clock -
huge, grey-haired body bullets toward me,
its echo follows close behind.
I tense, then roll over
toward birdsong
morning.




This is a post about a nightmare and its resolution for IGRT.  I don't often have nightmares, but being the good little toad that I am, I had a delightfully creepy one last night about rats.  I think woke to find that the squeaking was actually the very insistent early birds outside my bedroom window.  Oh, and this poem is called a rictameter, marked by the syllable count per line of 2/4/6/8/10/8/6/4/2.  Images by: Rat - retrojunk.com, birds - metrolic.com 

Sunday, June 10, 2012

House of Words




I am trapped in a house of words:
words of my own making
and yours.
Each note adds another layer
to thick walls encasing me.

I scribble as fast as I can
trying to write my way out,
but my pages fill the doors and windows,
piling higher and higher.

From the ceiling
incomplete sentences,
dependent clauses,
salutations and post scripts
rain down.

Words of love, carefully phrased,
and smooth, treacherous lies
fall at my feet.
I am surrounded by
words of iron indifference
and crumpled disinterest.

Words I can no longer read,
letters I cannot bare to open
pool around my ankles.
Eventually I will drown in them,
here in my house of words.



This image, Still Life, 1670, detail by Jean François de Le Motte, is provided by Tess at The Mag to inspire writers.  If you like to write, read or think I suggest you check it out. 

Saturday, June 9, 2012

A Foreign Land


This is a place
where names don’t fit.
All my nouns fall to the ground, in heaps
and the grey of night and day,
of sea and sky, converge.
We sit on plastic chairs
and wait,
in this room full of
impossibly old strangers.

I worry for my family.
I don’t know where they are
or how they are getting on.
The postcard I live on does not have room
for them, so I stay here
alone.

This is the time we eat.
The food is foreign to me;
grey mounds…moist and tasteless.
I smell only cleaning solution.
There are small weapons beside the plate,
for this place is riddled with small dangers.

There are no trees, no birds
in this place.
I think an evil witch has stolen them.
If only I could remember
the spell to bring them back.
I try to recite it, but all that comes from my mouth is:
dit dit dit dit dit

This is the time we go to bed.
There are bars on my bed.
They lock me into it at night
for my safety…
because this place is riddled with small dangers.
Imagine, being locked into a bed,
alone.
Once, I would have given anything
to be locked in bed with you.
But now I can’t find you.
I call and call your name,
all night from my lonely bed
but you never answer.
I think you have forgotten me.
Or maybe you were stolen by the witch, 
who took the trees and birds.

I worry for my family.
I try to summon you
with the magic spell:
dit dit dit dit dit
But this is a place
where names don’t fit.
All my nouns fall to the ground, in heaps.


Alzheimer's sucks.  Let's find a cure.  
This can  be found at IGRT  with many talented artists' responses to dementia, and at NWCU where folks are responding to foreign lands.  Check them out.


Sunday, June 3, 2012

Vita-Man, the PC, Organic, Hippie Super Hero! & Top 10


   
    The Obligatory Top 10 Juvenile Comments

    1.       EAT ME!
    2.       Just veggin’ out
    3.       You are what you eat
    4.       Hmmm…he looks a little seedy to me
    5.       Just stay out of the hot tub, Stew.
    6.       Mr. Bean I presume?
    7.       You are the apple of my eye…and the grape, the artichoke, the cabbage, etc.
    8.       He’s in a vegetative state
    9.       Man cannot live by bread alone
  10.      If Dr. Frankenstein was a gardener…


A Modern Day Super-hero

Faster than a runner bean
More powerful than garlic-breath
Able to leap tall sunflowers in a single bound,
Look, out in the garden!
It’s a fruit!
it’s a vegetable!
it’s Vita-Man!

*Vita-Man can frequently be found coming to the aid of the food police, or baking organic pumpkin-flax seed muffins.  As a super-hero he is truly outstanding in his field.


With my apologies to Tess at The Mag and  Klaus Enrique Gerdes, the creator of the image which inspired this folly.