BRUSH, ROLLER, TAPE, FORGET IT

Having no choices is devastating, like when there is only one internet service provider in town so you’re stuck with it, no matter how slow it is.  But an overabundance of choice can be devastating in its own way.  Overwhelming.  Paralyzing.  Who wants to spend an hour in the cereal aisle at the supermarket, comparing the nutrition information on fifty different kinds?  Not me.  But that’s nothing compared to what you go through in the paint section of the hardware store. Thought you knew exactly what color you wanted?  Think again.

NOT FOR THE FAINT OF ART*
(Villanelle)

The art of choosing isn’t hard to master,
or so it seems, ‘til you must muddle through
a range of options growing ever vaster

My bedroom walls were faded and lackluster
I pictured in my mind a soothing blue
The art of choosing isn’t hard to master

The counter clerk was helpful and amassed a
stack of azure swatches for review
the range of options growing ever vaster

I stood there, google-eyed and flabbergasted
I hemmed and hawed, perhaps off-white would do?
The art of choosing can be hard to master

“What shade?  There’s picket fence or alabaster
meringue, vanilla, biscuit, pearl, ecru… ”
the range of options growing ever vaster

She jabbered on and on as I wheeled past her
and bid my brush and roller sad adieu
The art of choosing proved too hard to master,
an empty-handed blue and white disaster

*A parody of ONE ART by Elizabeth Bishop

Have a comment?  Click HERE to share it!

READING BETWEEN THE LINES

If you’re a writer and you submit your work, rejection letters are a part of life.  They are generic and carefully worded, so as to let the rejectee down as gently as possible.  My poem is crafted out of sentences from actual rejection letters I have received (in bold).  Note: I obfuscated or changed proper names to protect the innocent.  Sandwiched between the sanitized lines are my own sarcastic additions (in italics).  If you’ve been snubbed, you might as well have some fun with it.

Dear WRITER,
and I use the term “writer” loosely

Greetings from the LALA-ZINE staff
tasked with drafting rejection letters
Thank you for allowing us to consider
how appalling poetry can be, owing to
your recent submission, WHATEVER
which, quite frankly, took the cake.

We recognize the effort you put into
ignoring the clearly stated guidelines for
submitting this piece, and regret that
because it is a complete waste of paper,
it doesn’t meet our needs at this time
or at any other time, for that matter.

Rest assured, it was read thoroughly
by a sleep-deprived, first-year intern
and given most careful consideration
as in, What the hell were you thinking?
before being returned to you by mail
in the SASE you so dutifully provided.

Ultimately, simple editorial preference
for quality work over hackneyed refuse
guides our choices; it is not a comment
OK, you got us…  it actually is a comment
on the merit of your particular piece
one best suited for the recycling bin

Although we are unable to accept it,
(our congenial euphemism for rejection)
we wish you luck in placing it elsewhere
You are going to need it, in this situation
and in all your future writing endeavors
Take my advice, don’t quit your day job.

Sincerely,
Not really,
Mae B. Nextime
First Assistant to the Assistant Editor
and Voice of Your Harshest Inner Critic

Have a comment?  Click HERE to share it!

LIFE WITH A FAHRVERGREMLIN

In a prior post involving supernatural phenomena, I mentioned the FahrverGremlin that lived inside my 1989 Volkswagen Fox.  I owned Foxy for ten years, until she was nineteen with 279,000* miles.  That little “driving annoyance” kept me junking, jury rigging, and devising workarounds until the minute the title changed hands.  I presented a potential buyer with a two-page list of Foxy’s quirks and he scoffed, saying I “wasn’t gonna scare him off that easy.”  We settled on fifty bucks, but before I could collect it, he laid a hard luck story on me.  I gave him a 100% discount, but still felt as though I’d ripped him off.

As you might imagine, Foxy’s impish stowaway caused a few crazily comic scenes.  The look on a friend’s face when I hit the brakes at a stoplight and the glove box flew open, spewing its contents all over
her feet.  The glower of the parking valet when I tossed him my keys with a warning that both the AC and reverse gear were out of order. The E-check gal’s wide-eyed alarm when she brushed the horn button with her boob during the emissions test and it blared mercilessly until she pulled it out of the garage and shut off the ignition.  I wonder if Foxy’s still on the road, how much more mischief the FahrverGremlin has stirred up.  Below are some examples from my own experience:

Have a comment?  Click HERE to share it!

WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS

Seems anything can be a sport these days, even things that require little or no physical skill or talent.  Like chess.  Or poker.  Since I suck
at chess and cannot control my “tells,” I need the Olympics to hand
out gold medals in something for which I possess natural aptitude:

THE BEDROOM SPORT  —  Sonnet
(No, not that one!  Geez, get your mind out of the gutter.)

If snoring were to be declared a sport,
a competition all night long would rage
Chuffing Chortle versus Thunder Snort,
contenders on the PosturePedic stage
Pure monotone or wild cacophony?
Scoring-wise, it doesn’t really matter,
but uvulation is compulsory;
the judges gotta hear them tonsils rattle
A deviated septum raises hell,
like a double chin or lying on your back,
all guaranteed to boost your decibels
and jerk the needle on the seismograph
But in the end who wins, you or your mate,
depends on who’s asleep and who’s awake

Have a comment?  Click HERE to share it!

SPRING FORWARD, AUTUMN BACK?

Is it Autumn or Fall?  My husband and I have debated the name of the season for the past thirty years.  To me, fall has always been fall.  My parents said so; when you’re a kid, they’re the authority on everything.  That hit a snag when I started school.  Apparently, the last two meals
of the day are lunch and dinner, not dinner and supper, as I had always been told.  My lunch box was proof.  My parents disputed this claim.  Back in the day, when they walked ten miles, uphill both ways, to the one-room schoolhouse, they had carried dinner pails.  Ask a teenage Wal-Mart clerk where to find “dinner pails” and you’ll get a blank look, the same one you get if you inquire about canning jars or clothespins.  The 80-year-old greeter will know what you’re after; if he’s a wise-ass, he’ll snicker and direct you to the Olsen’s Mercantile in Walnut Grove.  Fall, however, was validated on the bulletin board in our classroom.
F-A-L-L, spelled out in big, official-looking letters and surrounded by a mélange of red, orange, and yellow construction paper leaves.  If a nun said it was so, it was so.  Nuns were demi-gods, after all.  Fall remained rock-solid, unchallenged until I married a man who insisted “autumn” was the correct word for the season between summer and winter.  If that were true, it would be the dinner/supper dilemma reincarnated, not to mention poor Sister Josetta having to suffer in purgatory, her penance for lying.  The librarian hedged, saying it could go either way; fall was simply vernacular for the “proper” term, autumn.  Not one to lose sleep over being proper, I used fall and autumn interchangeably
for years without really thinking about it.  Then I did think about it:

FALL BY THE WAYSIDE

Mankind was damned
by its fall from grace;
we fall off the wagon,
we fall on our face

We fall ill but we never
fall into good health
We fall into ruin,
not winnings or wealth

We fall blindly in love,
a free fall of the heart,
falling out, then away,
‘til it all falls apart

We fall over ourselves
but fall short of success,
falling victim, it seems,
to our own eagerness

Fall down on the job
or fall prey to a scam
and you’ll need to resort
to your fall-back plan

Pleas fall on deaf ears
A joke might fall flat
Fall too far behind and
you’ll fall off the map

We fall on our swords,
take the fall for a friend,
doomed to fall ‘til the big
curtain falls at the end

Connotations of gloom
are surely the reason
that AUTUMN, not FALL,
is my favorite season

Have a comment?  Click HERE to share it!

PLUNGED INTO A NIGHTMARE

Have you ever felt like you were being trolled after making an online purchase?  The Cosmos knows not only what you bought, but a host of other things you might like, based on that choice.  It suggests items to complement or enhance it.  It pops up helpful messages like “Others who bought this item also bought X, Y, and Z.”  This may be tolerable if you’ve purchased something innocuous, like a socket set or a sleeping bag or a case of dog food.  But if it was something of a more personal nature, look out.  It could trail behind you like an embarrassing ribbon
of toilet paper stuck to your heel.  Read and heed this cautionary tale:

BUYER BEWARE

The Squatty Potty© that I bought
as a gag gift for a friend
unleashed a virtual onslaught
of gear for my rear end

A screen popped up before I had
completed my transaction
suggesting, for my favorite lad,
a kit called Master Crapsman©

The link connected in a snap
to a site for Poo-Pourri©
Just spritz the bowl with Trap-a-Crap©
and drop a deuce, scott-free!

They also thought I might enjoy
a box of quilted Shittens©
an ill-conceived commercial ploy
for wet wipes shaped like mittens

I cleared my cookies straightaway
suspecting double-cross
but onward marched the shit parade
like a wave of chocolate sauce

T-shirts with “I pooped today!”
stamped across the chest,
padded seats and chrome bidets
and fiber supplements

Free shipping on a new commode,
a plumbing tour de force
designed to handle outsize loads
in just one flush, of course

I phoned the website to demand
they cork their brown assault
They claimed it was out of their hands
Alas, the system’s fault

Angry and dissatisfied
with this, their final word,
I rummaged through my phone’s archive
for the smug emoji turd

I thought I’d mess with them a bit
On a survey from their end,
I awarded them five little shits

and pushed the key to SEND

The last laugh wasn’t mine, I fear
I found myself upstaged,
Joan LIKES the Squatty Potty! smeared
across my FaceBook page

Have a comment?  Click HERE to share it!

DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU!

Independence Day!  Woo hoo!  A paid day off for picnics, parades, and fireworks to celebrate our freedom.  Well, the scraps of it we haven’t traded away in the name of our “safety and security.”  Big Brother’s presence seems kind of comforting, right?  That’s exactly how he gets his foot in the door.  Remember, if he’s looking out for you, he must also have his eye on you.  You and everyone else.  Watch enough cop shows and you will learn what’s possible; they don’t just make all that stuff up, you know.  You could dismiss this whole post, write me off as
a crackpot conspiracy theorist.  It’s your prerogative.  But as they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

THE EYE IN THE SKY

The spy next door that peeks
around her curtain night and day
is not just “being neighborly.”
More likely, CIA.

You know that crackling static
while you wait for the dial tone?
It could be someone listening in,
a wire tap on your phone.

The camera on your monitor
that transmits while you Skype
sees every keystroke that you make,
each password that you type.

Cells and hard drives can’t delete
your comms or browsing history.
The back-up files are always there;
just how remains a mystery.

Tabs are kept on bank accounts
with each transaction logged.
Credit cards know where you shop
and stay alert for fraud.

The black box hiding in your car
stores constant data readings.
It knows if you don’t buckle up
and how fast you were speeding.

ATMs and traffic cams
have facial recognition.
The GPS inside your phone
can ping without permission.

We’re slowly being poisoned
by Big Pharma and Big Ag,
your death marked “undetermined”
as they zip the body bag.

My buddies say I’m paranoid,
and are they right?  You betcha.
These days you gotta watch your back;
this world is out to getcha.

Have a comment?  Click HERE to share it!

WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU ORANGES…

This week, I’m taking a detour from Form Street onto Rhyme Avenue.  Where that ends, we’ll follow the road less traveled, an unpaved trail called Oblique Lane.  Anyone who regularly writes rhymed poetry will wind up here sooner or later.  Oblique is an umbrella-term for rhyme that is close but not exact.  You might also hear it called slant rhyme, lazy rhyme, imperfect rhyme, half rhyme, near rhyme, off rhyme, or even assonant rhyme, phrases loaded with enough sorry connotations to make your best option sound like trailer trash.  Don’t let that scare you.  Oblique rhymes possess a jury-rigged cleverness that springs out and surprises the reader, a feat that turns predictable verse green (or maybe orange?) with envy.  The best excuse for using an oblique is the lack of a perfect rhyme, but who needs an excuse?  I adore them and encourage you to slide them into your poetry whenever and wherever you wish.  In that spirit, I’ve composed a LAI, an edgy attempt to prove that whoever said “nothing rhymes with orange” was only half right:

IMPERFECTLY PERFECT

End-words like orange
offer a challenge
quite unique
Rhyme must be foraged,
an assonant change
in technique
A lazy, half-knowledge
slanted in homage
to Oblique

Have a comment?  Click HERE to share it!

ONCE UPON A TIME…

Narrative and epic poems have been around for centuries.  These are usually book-length works that tell a tale.  I haven’t the fortitude to pen the next Iliad or Odyssey, but I do like to write STORY poems, a type of “bite-sized” memoir.  This one’s dedicated to all the underdogs, and my friend Lana, who introduced me to the story poem.  The jerk who tried to kill me with the kickball was named DONALD, by the way.  Go figure.

OUT IN LEFT FIELD

She is too klutzy for kickball, so
she spends recess
with a library book
But in gym class, participation is
non-negotiable
Chosen dead last,
she takes her place in the outfield
With bases loaded,
the class jock steps
smugly to the plate to run them in
BOOM!  A pop-fly
speeds toward her,
a red missile trained on its target
The ball strikes with
a resounding smack;
she reels, but clutches it to her chest
He’s OUT!  Red-faced,
cursing, he snatches
his cap, slams it to the ground, and
stomps on it, leaving
a big, dusty footprint
Seething with incredulity and rage,
his odious eyes bore
full-force into hers
but it is her moment to be a hero
and she flaunts the
burning imprint on
her cheek like a badge of honor

Have a comment?  Click HERE to share it!

NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN

In a MONOTETRA, each stanza is comprised of four rhymed lines.  Each line has four metrical feet, a total of eight syllables.  What makes it such a powerful form is that the closing line of each stanza is four syllables, repeated.  A Monotetra can have as few or as many stanzas as desired.  C’mon, sink your teeth into one!  They’re the greatest.  You’ll love ’em.

TEMPTATION

On Sunday mornings, I escape
to wait in line with jaws agape
and scope the sugary landscape
of rounded shapes, of rounded shapes

From the case, glazed bodies gleam
filled with jelly, filled with cream
and twisted cinnamon daydreams
Their silent screams, their silent screams

penetrate my helpless brain
and though resistance I might feign
my diet’s headed down the drain
‘cause donuts reign, ‘cause donuts reign

Have a comment?  Click HERE to share it!