Why do the humble always bumble?
They stumble and their projects tumble,
their thoughts a jumble. So they mumble
and grumble, while their drear works crumble.
Why can’t they stand, speak, be unbowed?
Say it aloud. Be proud!
*****
“Gay Pride” by Dave Pitt is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Because it would have gone like this: Hello,
hello, hello. (You never like me, did you?
Where was this friendship 15 years ago?)
You’re looking wonderful. I wouldn’t kid you
about it – you look great. (You hefty cat.)
And Jeffrey – are you married? Oh, you are!
Three kids? However did you manage that?
(For God’s sake, someone point me to the bar.)
Me? I’ve just spent the summer in Tibet
learning some basics from a Buddhist nun.
It’s an experience I won’t forget.
(As if you cared.) More crab dip, anyone?
(And here’s the Great Class Bore. You’re still the same.)
Forgive me. I can’t quite recall your name.
*****
Gail White writes: ” ‘Why I Failed to Attend My High School Reunion’ is humor based on truth. I’m now 78 and have never been to a class reunion. Nobody who likes me would be there. I didn’t make real friends until I went to college and started meeting people who read books.”
Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her books ASPERITY STREET and CATECHISM are available on Amazon. She is a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine. “Tourist in India” won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for 2013. Her poems have appeared in the Potcake Chapbooks ‘Tourists and Cannibals’, ‘Rogues and Roses’, ‘Families and Other Fiascoes’, ‘Strip Down’ and ‘Lost Love’. ‘Why I Failed to Attend My High School Reunion’ was first published in Light Poetry Magazine and is collected in her chapbook, ‘Sonnets in a Hostile World‘, also available on Amazon.
Photo: “High School 5 Year Reunion” by Oliver Mayor is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
When I was in the printing biz,
in magazines (I worked at MS),
under my office door was slipped
a neatly-typed-out MS,
its cover letter curt and snippy,
return address in MS.
And what a scoop! New drug (its doses
prescribed for MS)
a fraud! The source, in bold defiance,
a chemist with a MS.
I showed my boss. “Yeah, right!” she reckoned,
and canned me in a MS.
*****
Daniel Galef provides this key to the various standard meanings of the abbreviation:
“Ms. Magazine; manuscript; Mississippi; multiple sclerosis; Master of Science degree; millisecond.”
Daniel Galef’s first book, Imaginary Sonnets, was published last year. ‘Letters to an Editor’ was published as part of his being the Featured Poet in Light Poetry Magazine. He is currently working on a book of comic poetry and wordplay, as well as on a PhD from the University of Cincinnati.
Photo: “Ms. magazine Cover – Winter 2015” by Liberty Media for Women, LLC is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The sun is always setting, always setting on your day;
you sense the dark approaching, wish that it would stay away.
Do you want a life unchanging? Wish to still be a newborn?
Don’t you know life’s not a rosebud, but has root and leaf and thorn?
The sun is always setting and the black drapes are unfurled;
but notice that the sun sets on your world, not on the world:
it’s rolling into brightness in another’s happy land,
and the dark is evanescent and the brightening is grand.
The sun is always setting on the dinosaurs, but birds
are flocking into being, as are Serengeti herds;
and the sun that lights humanity? Of course it’s going to set,
and elsewhere light new tales of which we’ll just be a vignette.
The sun is always setting, but that view is just your choice;
I say the world is turning and evolving; I rejoice.
*****
Sometimes I’m told that my poetry is too bleak. But I think that’s only so if you want everything to stay as it is now. If, on the other hand, you expect change, and that change will ultimately provide more benefit than loss to the universe as a whole, then <shrug>… so it goes.
This poem has 14 lines but is hardly a sonnet. It was recently published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. Thanks, David Stephenson!
Photo: “Sunset Sadness” by BaboMike is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Cock a buggery doodle doo!
I’m bending to lace up this buggery shoe!
You’d be buggery bad-tempered too
If the buggery cock
Woke you buggery up
At buggery, buggery five twenty two!
*****
Annie Fisher writes: “When our grandchildren were very small, we would sometimes visit to help with child care. The children would often burst into our bedroom early in the morning yelling ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ (Probably encouraged by their parents). On one occasion my husband was staying with them for a few days without me. On the second day he sent me a text at the crack of dawn. The text read ‘Cockabuggerydoodledoo!’ and so I understood that his day had already begun! I thought ‘cockabuggerydoodledoo’ (a case of ‘expletive infixation’, Google tells me) had irresistible rhythmic force.
My poem is, of course, based on the traditional nursery rhyme:
Cock a doodle doo!
My dame has lost her shoe,
My master’s lost his fiddling stick
And knows not what to do.“
Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry (this one appeared in Snakeskin) for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: (2016) and (2020), and is due to have another pamphlet published in the next couple of months with Mariscat Press. It will be called ‘Missing the Man Next Door’. She is a member of Fire River Poets in Taunton, Somerset and a regular contributor to The Friday Poem https://thefridaypoem.com/annie-fisher/
Photo: “cock-a-doodle-doo.” by alyssaBLACK. is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Before the booze-up session, all are statues.
Their prior falling-outs lodge doggedly
Upon their mouths like pillars of a building.
The visit’s just a plain formality.
But when the drinks are served, all lips begin
To open slow like rusty dungeon doors.
A glow of cheer unfolds upon their cheeks
Like dawn illuminates night-darkened shores.
Once they have reached the point of being swacked,
Then one by one they clear the awful air
Infected with self-pride, distaste, and spite.
The daftest cousin turns into Voltaire.
The silent uncle starts to sing his praises
Of how he’d saved three bullocks in a flood.
The two-faced aunt becomes a freedom fighter:
I’ll kill and die for us! We are one blood!
And I, the teetotaller, sit and weigh
If they’ll return to stone the coming day.
*****
Shamik Banerjee writes: “The absurd, ridiculous, and perennial drama between my relatives’ families inspired me to write this poem.”
Shamik Banerjee is a poet from India. He resides in Assam with his parents. Some of his recent works will appear in York Literary Review, Willow Review, Thimble Lit, and Modern Reformation, to name a few.
Photo: from original publication of the poem in Dear Booze: https://dearbooze.com/cocktales/f/in-a-family-gathering
How brashly brave, embroiled in this brief life,
we chance our challenge to the unchanging gods!
Strike poses, strut the strident stage of strife,
take optimistic oaths against all odds.
Fearless of foes, false friends, futility,
we wrack our reason to reach, undestroyed—
though usually of no utility—
a burst of brightness bettering the void.
*****
Although I prefer to maintain an unobtrusive persona myself, I subscribe to this philosophy of bravado existentialism. The florid alliteration suits the message.
This poem is published in the current issue of Light – thanks, Melissa Balmain and all.
Photo: “Flamboyant Emperor of the United States” by PeterThoeny is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
I found myself in bed with an old man.
His beard was silvery, his scrawny chest
a rack of ribs, his loose-lipped mouth open
and toothless as a baby. There he was,
there in our bed, as if he owned the place.
He snored and grunted like some ancient king
asleep after a banquet. But what feast
had led, dear heart, to this? What partying?
He turned his head to me. I saw his face—
a travesty. Some metamorphosis
had happened in our sleep, my love replaced
by a bag of windy bones. I need a piss,
he muttered, and got up. O then I knew
what age had done to us, and who was who.
*****
Helena Nelson writes: “Everyone experiences it eventually. You glance at your own reflection in the mirror and get a shock at how old you look. So that’s one of inspirations for this poem. The other spur to write this was a dream I had one night, though in the poem it’s intentionally unclear whether the experience is or isn’t real. I started with near rhymes in the octet and moved towards perfect rhyme at the end to convey the shock. I do hope the reader feels that shock at the end.”
‘Dream’ was originally published in The Dark Horse.
Helena Nelson runs HappenStance Press (now winding down) and also writes poems, one of which appears in the Potcake Chapbook, ‘Lost Love’. Her most recent collection is Pearls (The Complete Mr and Mrs Philpott Poems). She reviews widely and is Consulting Editor for The Friday Poem.
Under the moonlight’s magical hold
Lust prowls like a wolf, hungry and bold
Slinking by with a wink of the eye
Slowly drawing me in on the sly
Into temptation’s cunning allure
Tainting even the purest of pure
Whispered confessions into the wind
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned
*****
Editor’s comments: I’m classifying these lines as ‘casual form’: the meter is undisciplined by classical standards, but the beat is clear and the rhymes are straightforward. The verse is as natural to English as nursery rhymes, noted for their ease of memorisation without being classically regular. Look at the varying numbers of syllable per foot in the four lines of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, for example. English speech is very forgiving regarding unstressed syllables, while still maintaining a rhythmic flow – as we know from rap. By that standard, adherence to beat and structured rhyme is adherence to form.
Lisa Marshall is a poet and author who resides in beautiful Dartmouth, Nova Scotia – also known as the City of Lakes. She is the author of Black Olive: A Novel and Poetry for the Feminist’s Soul, both of which are available on Amazon Kindle.
Read more at Not Another Nice Girl Blog.
Photo: from Lisa Marshall’s blog.
On a dead spaceship drifting round a star,
the trapped inhabitants are born and die.
The engineers’ broad privileges lie
in engine room and solar panel power.
The fruit and vegetables and protein co-ops
are run by farmers with genetics skills:
the products of their dirt and careful kills
help service trade between the several groups.
Others — musicians, architects — can skip
along the paths of interlinking webs.
Beyond these gated pods that the rich carve
for their own selves (but still within the ship),
in useless parts, are born the lackluck plebs.
Heard but ignored, they just hunt rats or starve.
*****
This sonnet was republished in Bewildering Stories in April 2024 – original publication had been in Star*Line five years previously. I find something very satisfying about using a formal sonnet structure to express science fiction and speculative fiction ideas – the ideas are by nature open-ended, unconstrained, and it feels good to tie them down as in a neat package with a bow on top. Topiary.
As for what political comments can be read into the poem, read away!
Photo: “Deepstar 2071 at Io” by FlyingSinger is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Form in Formless Times 