Category Archives: Photography

Dog in a Tartan Skirt (Edit)

 

Dog in a Tartan Skirt 

There’s a dog wearing a tartan skirt
outside the window of Starbuck’s;
a tartan skirt, a belt, and a knitted white sweater.
Its little dog legs are moving frantically
on the wet pavement,
while across the slick road
and the sodden green park
the ocean sits
like a slab of lead
having clearly decided
to take some time off,
no crashing on the shore today.
South of the border
America blunders around
trying to remember
where it parked
that big ass car
that everyone admired
and envied.
The people look to God
but God, once again,
is moving in mysterious ways;
I, for one, wish He would knock it off,
enough already with the mystery
could He not for once in His eternal life,
clarify something?
I mean, for fuck sake,
there’s a dog wearing a tartan skirt
outside the window of Starbuck’s.

Weekly Photo Challenge (Sunrise on Planet Cistern)

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Sunrise on Planet Cistern

The weekly photo challenge is closing down for some reason, so the final theme is “all time favourite photos”. I am not a photographer by any means, I just take photos to decorate my poetry blog, but this one amuses me no end. I have sliced and diced it and used in a number of posts.

Now for the first time I will reveal its secret. The windows in our upstairs bathroom face south and in the late evening the sun shines through the  side windows and the glass shower doors and creates rainbow patterns on the walls. This particular pattern turned up behind the toilet cistern in the angle between the walls. I zoomed in as close as I could with my iPhone, took the photo then rotated it. The curved surface at the bottom is actually the shadow of the cistern.

Equipment used : iPhone, Kohler 6 litre (per flush) cistern.

 

 

 

Don’t Play in the Traffic

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Don’t Play in the Traffic

they met on a zebra crossing
it was a pedestrian affair
she had an air of competence
he…just had an air
they went downhill from there
to her house
in the middle of a roundabout
near the station
one morning they looked out
and the cars had changed rotation
the clouds were tinged
with a tawdry shade of orange
the sky was diffident
the sun judgmental
things would not be the same
would not be the same again.

 

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Short Unsolicited Advice on Writing Poetry

 

Short Unsolicited Advice on Writing Poetry

write long poems on short days
short poems on long days
you don’t need a drummer
but you do need rhythm
avoid melodrama
your head cannot explode all the time,
there is uncharted territory
between ecstasy and despair
look after your images
they should splash like cold water
on the reader’s face
observe, always observe.

 

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Taking part in Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Writing Poetry

 

 

Dog Days

via Daily Prompt: Cur 

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Dog Days

Oscar’s wife, Anka,
declared:
we need to procure
a guard dog
to make our home secure,
a real dog
not some mangy cur
some obscure miniature
some saliva dripping
skinny impostor
looking for a sinecure
a dog that barks
at every knock on the door
and when, Oscar asked,
should this occur?
Yesterday, she said,
or before.

 

Photo taken at the Takashi Murakami exhibition (The octopus eats its own leg) at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

I Often ask Myself the Question ( James Comey and other imponderables)

 

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1

I often ask myself the question:
Is James Comey a bit of a wanker
a self-aggrandizing prima donna
who only looks honourable
when compared to Donald Trump?
I often ask myself that question.

2

I often ask myself the question:
can a man
mansplain to a man
or can a man
only mansplain
to a woman, and if so
if one explains something
in a condescending manner
to a member
of one’s own gender
is one, in effect,
cisplaining?
I often ask myself that question.

 

The Toddler King Part (1)

 

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    Orange is the New Bleak 1 (3)

The Toddler King Part (1)

5 am in America

the toddler king
checks his Twitter feed

a five hundred pound ball
of carbohydrate and grease
rolls across the parking lot
of a big box store,
no one notices

assault rifles take stock

the second amendment
thinks about making amends

the founding fathers
find themselves wanting.

 

Tree (woman with stroller)- 2

 

Nature Poem (a slim verse)

you call your

self a tree

my bank has

more branches.

 

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plus a bonus poem in which Slim escapes the 3 syllable shackles of slimverse and displays an uncharacteristic lightness of being.

 

The Low November Sun

The low November sun
hits the silver birches
and the cherry tree
sending the bush tits
and the black-capped
chickadees
into a flitting frenzy
Who pulled the alarm?
Which one is my nest?
Where did I leave that worm?

Both poems have appeared in other posts, this combination was prompted by the Daily Prompt – ‘branch’.

Word of the Day – Cisgender

Word of the Day – Cisgender

Origins:
‘Cis’ is a latin prefix meaning ‘on the same side of’. ‘Cisgender’ is a term used to describe people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth.

Examples of use in a sentence:
1. Last night at dinner, he told his family he was ‘cisgender’; they said: “what’s changed?”
2. I am a cisgender, bi-national ( two passports), white male.

Assumptions that can be made from sentence no.2:
Never assume anything about anybody based on a label.

What I dislike about the word:
It was spawned in academia and therefore is more likely to obfuscate rather than clarify.
It has a whiff of fundamentalism, totalitarianism to it; it has the odour of doctrine.
When I hear the word, I hear the language police knocking on my door.

What I really dislike about the word:
There is no poetry in it; no alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme. Not one letter is repeated. All those wheedling slender vowels, the awful hiss of that first syllable like a snake slithering across the floor. And then, and then that doughy ‘g’ which can’t be saved by the late arrival of that hard ‘d’ like an ambulance to an accident.

Other than that……I’m fine with it

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Photo: English Bay, Vancouver, A-MAZE-ING LAUGHTER, by Yue Minjun.