I can read minds, you know, and it’s not always pleasant. Like right now, you’re showing interest and kind of nodding along like you totally buy into what I’m telling you, because that’s the persona you want to project: openmindedness. But what you’re really thinking is that my purported ability to read minds is totally bonkers, and I must be, too.
We all have personas that we try to sell. Intellectual, confident, bad ass, honest and open… Yep, that last one is a projection, too. I mean, maybe you are honest and open. I’m not saying you aren’t. But you also want to be seenas honest and open, because that’s your persona.
So here’s the problem with reading minds: I can read who you are, who you think you are, who you think other people think you are, who you wish you were, who you wish others would think you were… That's a lot of reading, and -- as I said -- not so pleasant.
So, what about me? Who am I? Who do I think I am? Who do other people think I am? Besides bonkers, that is. I really haven’t a clue. What do you think I am, a mind reader?
Day Six prompt from NaPoWriMo.net: In your poem today, try writing with a breezy, conversational tone, while including at least one thing that could only happen in a dream.
Day Five prompt from NaPoWriMo.net: write a poem in which you talk about disliking something – particularly something utterly innocuous, like clover. Be over the top! Be a bit silly and overdramatic.
Day Four prompt from NaPoWriMo.net: craft [a] short poem that involves a weather phenomenon and some aspect of the season. Try using rhyme and keeping your lines of roughly even length.
He listens carefully to the recounting of symptoms, performs some preliminary tests, and they discuss options for treatment.
A clean cloth is laid out at his side, with a tidy row of tools he will use to perform the operation
He selects the appropriate instruments, and sets to work. Prep, syphon, excavate the offending material, rinse, close, seal.
“All done,” he says, washing up at the sink with anti-microbial soap. “I fixed the leak, cleared out the s-trap, and replaced some worn washers. Your toilet should work fine now.”
“Oh, thanks, man,” says the homeowner to the plumber. “You saved my life.”
Day Three prompt from NaPoWriMo.net: Today, we challenge you to write a poem in which a profession or vocation is described differently than it typically is considered to be.
The canvas panel lays before me, blank and pristine. Or almost pristine. Scuff marked and yellow tinged; it's been sitting around for a while.
A horizontal penciled line, not quite centered. Top portion is the sky. Paint it blue, I’m told.
But skies aren’t out-of-the-tube blue on flat canvas. They’re deep, dappled with clouds sometimes, softened by invisible breezes at other times. Troubled by storms, subdued by dawn’s tentative tendrils. That all comes later, I’m told.
I dab at the blue mound on waxed paper. Oil or acrylic, I don’t recall.
Mom sits nearby, chatting with her friend who is -- ostensibly -- here to teach me art. They gossip – well, the friend does. Mom listens, jokes, commiserates. Passes judgment.
A large book lies open on the table, showing step-by-step how to recreate the painting: an old barn on a rutted dirt road alongside a generic, leafless tree.
Sketch the outlines as illustrated, I'm told. I don’t want to. This is someone else's painting, not mine. I don’t know what the barn has seen, what the tree has felt.
Who traversed the road to carve the ruts, Where were they headed? What did they find upon arrival?
I put lines on the canvas with a #2 pencil. That’s enough for tonight, I’m told. My mom and her friend barely glance at my work, make vague plans for a return visit. The friend leaves.
The half-blue, scuffed canvas sits on the floor in a dark corner of my bedroom closet. For years.
Day Two prompt from NaPoWriMo.net: “write [a] poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.”
“Your yard gets a lot of attention from my visitors!” my neighbor calls from the edge of her manicured lawn. I survey my property, a burgeoning habitat for native plants and the native critters that feed upon them.
“Yeah,” I reply. “Someone recently asked me if I was letting the yard go wild to reduce my property taxes.”
My neighbor laughs, and then admits the nature of the “attention” to which she had alluded.
“My visitors ask, ‘Does she mean for her yard to look that way?’ ‘She’s planting all that brush intentionally?’”
bear grass and buckbrush, coyote bush and deer fern… and skunk cabbage? Please!
I wonder if those are the thoughts of visitors or of my neighbor, or maybe of all who see my native landscaping. So be it. I settle into the rocking chair on my back porch and watch bees – legs plump with pollen – buzz through the California poppies. Ladybugs dine on aphids among the large-leaved lupines, and a pair of mourning doves peck for seeds beneath a clump of prairie june grass.
summer solstice nears farewell-to-spring’s pink petals blossoming on cue
While walking through the park, my dog Chules and I pause at an apple tree. I am drawn to the white-pink blossoms and the bees that float among them. Chules is more intrigued by the base of the trunk, and the invisible messages left there by other dogs. He lifts his leg and adds his own note to the trunk.
cherry blossoms wane
pink petals carpet the ground
apple tree looks on
Day 29 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo). In response to dVerse prompt: Haibun Monday: late cherry blossoms.
Day 26 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) .
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a sonnet. The strict rules of sonnets:
14 lines
10 syllables per line
Those syllables are divided into five iambic feet. (An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable).
Rhyme schemes vary, but the Shakespearian sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg (three quatrains followed by a concluding couplet).
Sonnets are often thought of as not just little songs, but little essays, with the first six-to-eight or so lines building up a problem, the next four-to-six discussing it, and the last two-to-four coming to a conclusion.
The “rules” are somewhat bendable, but I tried stay relatively true to the strict format. Herewith:
Sales Pitch (Read the Signs)
The sign says No Solicitors. You knock. Beware the Dog that lunges at my door. “The rats and piss ants this year run amok.” You’ll slay them all. They’ll bother me no more.
A spider egg sac hangs upon the wall. “A hundred spiderlings your home will fill.” More likely to my garden they will crawl to feast upon the bugs you wish to kill.
No rodents, bugs or crawlies bother me. The poison’s “safe for pets,” you persevere. My Wildlife Habitat sign plain to see; No chemicals have touched my yard in years.
Your sales pitch failed, now please just go away. My “pests” will live to see another day.
What Rhymes with Stanza? 