Reality

Friday Fictioneers 7/31/2020

Many thanks to Rochelle @ Rochelle Wisoff-Fields-Addicted to Purple for herding us through Friday Fictioneers, even while on a vacation visit. The challenge is to write a story based upon a photo prompt, today by Jean L. Hays.

With fewer than 101 words we are challenged to contrive a beginning, middle, and an end.

Photo prompt © Jean L. Hays

Title: Whisperer Bay
Genre: Animal Fiction (Allegory)
Word count: 100

I rowed my skiff into the bay and leaned against the seat to vegetate under the stars.

There was a nearby splash. Something bumped the boat. Then again.

Then a voice. “Relax. Don’t talk. Just make sounds.”

I could barely see the head of a dolphin looking at me.

I spoke. “You can talk?”

Again, “Don’t talk. Make sounds. I don’t understand speech. I cannot talk.”

I thought, I must be dreaming.

“No. Some humans understand echolocation sounds. You do.”

I thought, I understand you and you me.

“Come back this time tomorrow. Plan to stay longer. I’ll explain then.”

Relaxed attention sees both ways and perceives concealed secrets.
Mind mental gaps.

Click blue frogs for link to inlinkz

Poetry: dVerse Open Link Night #270 (my first)

Thanks to Mish and the folks at dVerse ~ Poets Pub, for Open Link Night #270 (click for link). This poem messes with where my head’s been lately.

***

Combatant

It could have been me.
A nod, a blink, an okay
and the next forty-five
years …

had I not been killed, maimed
or driven insane
(as many of us were)

… would not have been anything
like what I look back to today,
fifty-six long years hence,
with contrition, feeling the loss;

Personal, hidden, illogical
survivor syndrome. I can’t
make sense of it. The feeling
of a warrior who wasn’t.

Life choices often made
thoughtlessly, in a blink.
I could be dead. Change the past?
Not on your life or mine.

***

Look both ways at guilt for life: fortune or folly.
Mind the gaps in the mindless wars with reality.

Sammi’s Weekender #166 (hinterland)

Lannan banished him to Marfa, city of minimalist art,
in the hinterlands high-plains desert, a Trans-Pecos cowboy patch
in far west Texas. Controversial, wrangled, and angry (bless his heart),
Bloodaxe English poet Peter Reading endured being sacked

For having gallish cheek, remaining ununiformed 22 years,
being poet, For the municipality’s elderly,
as a mindless weighbridge operator and lover
of fine wine and birds, with gruesomely ironic humor.

Peter and I were born on the same Saturday,
he in Liverpool, I was not.
His revenge – Marfan and Shitheads.

Look both ways for hammering truthful humor
and light romantic comedy.
Mind the gap, said the man to the day tripper.

Poetry: End Times

You spoke, and I awoke,
yet I fear
the time is near
when the dark depressing truth
of humanity
will take root on its tail
and then devour itself to
end it all
forever. Maybe
that’s our difference.

You claim
god so wants it,
I say let’s ask
him
or her
or it
whatever.

Look both ways.
Because you were alive yesterday does not prove you will be tomorrow.
Mind the gaps in thought and deed.

Poetry: Impossible Void

The concept of non-existing,
of never was and shall not be,
the nothingness of nothing,
debated for eons, remains
impossible to prove or even
conceptualize.

Philosophers and scientists
since their first thought
have failed to define
an incomprehensible unreality
of utter insignificance that
many claimed existed,
but which really means,
never was there nothing.

Always something within
science; this physical universe
breathing change to essential matter,
random, yet never created or destroyed,
vast beyond human imagination,
becoming something else,
but never was it nothing,
always something,
forever and ever. Amen.

Look both ways to see into eternity.
Mind the gaps of deception.

Poetry: My Comfort Zone

I pass sweet scented bushes on my trek to hike trails,
I listen to songs. I see the cobalt blues and pinks
of early morning predawn skies. Then sunrise.

The familiar places, benches to rest, to drink,
to ponder, sometimes to listen
and to think about nature.

No talking. I write notes in my book,
a poem about this ravine I dare not cross,
about rocks for stepping or tripping.

About finding happiness outside my comfort zone,
as they say in the voice of cliché,
about what’s a name or identity. Am I what I did?

And the viper, that snake may not allow
my passage as he or she sunbathes
and the morning warms its cold blood.

Look both ways, but tread with care. Mind the gaps where vipers rest.

Three-foot rattlesnake blocking my trail.

Poetry: Big Red

When I first wrote this, I intended it for Sammi’s weekender. She had set a  prescribed limit of 88 words for the prompt word downpour, “no more, no less.” I was 95 words over. While Sammi has loosened up some of her rules, not that one. So, let’s call this poem, “A Second, Longer Downpour.”

She was a hog, bitchin’ red and heavy,
a real dresser on our outings.
Rider down, I could not lift her load.
I never gave her a name.

Straight pipe loud till I fixed her,
but on road trips, she was
my sweet ride. No hyperbole to say
she hugged road from between my legs.

Headin’ up busy highway north of
Fort Walton Beach when Ma Nature
hawked a torrential loogie thunderstorm.
As we headed back south, we got soaked.

The downpour first felt cold in my crotch.
With soaked windshield, visor, and glasses
I couldn’t see shit. I knew they (cars)
could not see me, or us, maybe not each other.

With us in the middle and idiots in cages
driving seventy while blind, we finally got home.
I cut her motor and dropped her stand.
Lovingly I leaned her left, slid off, and stopped shaking.

Walked into my garage, stripped naked, and
dropped soaked biker cloths right there. Yolonda
asked, “What happened to you?” The storm had passed.
I look at her and said, “I think I wet my pants.”

Look both ways. See and be seen.
Mind the gaps. Mind everything riding your hog.