Prompt #3: Lillie

Of tepees & taxes

It's tax time & my head hurts
while cherry blossoms pop over
Washington, over the heads of men 
who can't even agree how to spend
these monies.  Supposedly, April's
idyllic in the pleasures of unlocking,
from the trees rousing, shaking
sleep from their twigs in the wind
& bursting spring fever out their fingers,
to the squirrels accosting each to each
twitch of one psychotic tail to another,
but I sit here--               stoic--

I had a dream of a vegetable garden
& a tepee on an acre of land
somewhere with no cell phone reception,
then woke to a house that once burned down,
an abeyance of a path behind it to a lake
still moldering in flaked, airy ice crumbling
at the edge.  The neighbor's kid tramps
the white chips with orange Crocs,
a symbol of the tackiness
of modernity & its

form of institutionalized selfishness.
According to a W-2, most
anything can be owned except dreams,
& as I'm busy quantifying my life
here's my son chattering in a blanket
lying, crying in the office
waiting for mommy to finish
this form.

Prompt #2: Therese

Ode to Girl!

I once met a girl, her name was Falafel,
all she had to do was laugh at my reaction
in a terse, but wonderful giggle
& at once it consumed me how to
  put my mouth on this sweet chick
pea with the olive skin, almost
slightly singed in it's deep color
such a delicious intersection
of femininity and cuisine, so like a man
who after crashing his car stumbles
into a field of African Violets
I forgot what I had come for, mind
turning to the channel where girls
named Vixxy or Violet roll
their tongues over stuff--then
I remembered the advice Lee gave me
on the bus, just outside Be'ersheva:
Joey, she said, Its not ful-AW-full
it's fah-lah-lah-lah-LAH-fehl
and at the expert delivery of this
I received a hint of a smile,
the first little twinge of friendship, or?
Oh, my dear thing, I'll bet you're
all the way to Kathmandu by now
but still I will always call chickpeas
garbanzo beans, doesn't that sound awesome?
Sweet language of exotic names,
sweet mystery of hope, why at
the drop of a hat-- just a small smirk!--
I might jump off the peak of Masada
for you.


So if Chemists can specialize in Food Science, is this Food Art?

Prompt #1: Nance

for this prompt & those that follow, the bold type is the initial prompt

Ode to never seeing her again

I look inside the autumn sunset of her eyes--
eyes fogged like the first cool
morning of September.  Eyes brackish
as mulled cider.  In her eyes, a cloudy
dimness at dusk, visibility falling.

The flecks of red in her eyes like leaves
falling around a maple, bricking
the lawn with itself--how that
senescence consumes the world!
How beautiful & tragic
to scatter about what it nurtured,
&,having drained it of capability,
to discard it!

So this I wonder at
this red brick countenance of her
stare.  Hardness, but what we have
managed is a ceasefire.  This last meeting

is autumn foreshadowing winter
& a sunset is a bachelor's party before
night, the beauty of which comes from dust:
Oil in a puddle reflects a rainbow,
dirt burns on the horizon at sundown,
her hair frames her face finely.
Windswept & wild once, now it's shorter
so I, dully & lamely say, You

cut your hair? Mutinous.
It had once wound around her as ivy,
like leaves once dyed pink
then blue,
then she grew up,
then grew it out, outgrew, went grey
the same way sunsets
fade--the way a tree, feeling the first freeze
coming sheds its leaves:

Now I think I will think of
her when I smell the musk of dark
leaves wetted after a rain.

B'reshith: In the Beginning

Okay, so this blog starts with a promise to myself, to write more poetry.  To make time for poetry every day.  The first task was to get into a groove--shake off the miasma & write, write, write with abandon. & so I reached out to my friends to give me some prompts: free first lines for prospective poems.  What follows is my attempt at completing these poems started by some friends I dearly love, some family I even more dearly love, & a few lines I'd overheard in random conversation while lurking in the corner at a bar with a notebook.

& from there?