Sammi’s Weekender #223 (pre-loved)

Click on graphic for Sammi’s blog. I dropped the hyphen.

Passed Gas

When Dad said, “secondhand store,” I looked at my hands. Wondered which was bought second. It’s a euphemism for used. Now it’s preloved. Just bought a preloved printer. Nobody loves evil printers. They’re used.

Daughter, Julie, likens me to George Carlin. Not as funny, but I’m snarkastic. We both rant about softening lingo with euphemistic bull shit excrement. It’s doublespeak. Even good bad words, a euphemism for euphemisms. What’s your favorite?

Look both ways: a euphemism for pay attention or consider all options. Mind both past and future.
So is mind the gaps. Maybe metaphor is mo’ betta’.

Sammi’s Weekender #121 (thwart)

Of Gems or Germs

They number in trillions.
Too many to census tally,
on insides and outsides of every
human body, we each have
our own personal repertoire
of microbes keeping us alive.

In typical foolish human fashion
we’ve tried to kill them
with discovered miraculous medications,
intending genocide to thwart some few
deadly troublemakers by misusing
mass murder techniques, all
to our own peril and demise.

Look both ways for the connections of all life,
the great and the small.
Mind the gaps of gods and science and don’t be fooled by prophets or profits.

Poetry: Sammi’s Weekender #220 (oasis)

Sanctum or Asylum?

Refuge comes
at great cost.
This oasis shades no reality.
Sanctuary offers
only twisted truth.
Each prison is of my making.
I must move on.
I’ll never be free
of my past.
Change
or paranoia will hand me
fearful death.

Look both ways for any port in a storm
but learn to dance in the rain.
Mind the gaps as you seek the road less traveled.

Sammi’s Weekender #218 (tessellate)

Geometric Memory

It’s one of those words,
comforting to hear and speak.

To say as tongues touch teeth,
not lips, a fun word to think.

Fifty years since projected
mosaics, as she asked,
“Does this tessellate?” We
learned patterned meanings.

No use for the word, till now.
Yet, I remember the day and teacher
who taught me how polygons tessellate.

Look both ways teaching and learning lessons.
Memories are forever but mind the gaps for irretrievable loses.

Sammi’s Weekender #217 (requisite)

Tread At Your Own Risk

American men and women at war,
fighters. May I call them warriors?
For their military service
we want to thank them.
Combatants
share experiences
only they understand.
Only they feel it.

Requisites are hated enemies,
courage, weapons, desire for glory, fear,
comrades, pride; and a cause
to die for, one worth killing for.

There’s more.
Much more.
They carry much.

To fear death, or not? To love
and despise simultaneously?
Is war forever part of humanity?
Are we the only creatures
that kill our own for no reason? Just to kill.
To cause death unnecessarily?
Is that combat?

Look both ways for glory and dishonor.
Mind the gaps between mind, heart, and soul.

Sammi’s Weekender #215 (ink)

Click on graphic for Sammi Cox’s page and links to other works.

What a wonderful little word and inventive subject. I’ve written of pens and paints, but not of ink, before now. I even read the history of ink and how it was and is made. Forgive me brother and sister writers. I got so excited—I wrote two twenty-two-word poems. Like money and sex, only too much poetry is enough.

5K Years Since

Inks. Invisible,
permanent. India’s art.
Printing or pens.

Words on paper,
not electronically;
ink, a catalyst to creativity,
with words and art.

Lines of Magic

See the flow on paper,
watch lines, curves, and shapes
appear in history, law, art;
even in silent music on a page.

Look both ways for waves of imaginative creations.
Mind the gaps for innovation’s utility and art’s beauty.

Sammi’s Weekender #213 (galaxy)

On the Edge of Forever

Words of uncertainty apply.
Probably, and maybe perhaps,
as proportions with numbers
inconceivable and unimaginable,
describe vastness where nearby,
local galaxies, about fifty-one,
are or were within a mere
three megaparsecs. So close.

Suicidal giants like Tadpole, Black Eye,
Sunflower, and Cigar. Our nearest
neighbor, Andromeda, plans to crash
our party in four or five billion years.

Like the cosmos,
this Milky Way is mostly nothing,
toying with conversions of
angular momentum, universal
collisions of astronomy’s galactic
darlings. The realm of nebulae,
halfway to the edge of the known
universe, whatever that is.

Look both ways to search for a “small, quaint, tidy universe.”
But science “never ends.”
Mind the gaps for a “single ultimate truth.”
(Quotes from Cosmos by Carl Sagan)

Sammi’s Weekender #211 (nomenclature)

Handle With Care

Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge,
in the 10^th of Poemcrazy said,
“in practical shoes, holding forth
with firm opinions”
were too many Sues.

Birthed and baptized, lacking
middle saintly nomenclature,
seeking to assert rightful independence,
Confirmation granted my pick,
Saint Bartholomew, a sub
for unsainted Bartley.

Mom had a fit. We fought.
She wanted Richard. I did not.
Constant embarrassment,
my lifelong reminder,
my middle moniker: John.
I wish I agreed to Richard,
at least a better memory.

Look both ways for better self-names. How often would we change?
I’m Dad, Opa, Mister Bill to some, cantankerous (and other adjectives)
Bill or Billy to the few.
Mind the gaps where we may only name things, pets, and kids.

Sammi’s Weekender #210 (eerie)

There We Were

Six miles high at midnight, dodging lightning bolt thunderstorms, eerie Saint Elmo’s Fire covered; below, equally deep, the Marianas Trench beckoned. No one prayed.

Look both ways in foul or fair, self-reliance saves lives.
Mind the gaps between the storms for the reach of deadly lightning.

Sammi’s weekender #208 (solitudinarian)

For Ian

Somewhat solitudinarian, I’m bein’
in the midst of my septuagenarian age,
hopeful of promotion to octogenarian
like that Marion the librarian; she who was
so totalitarian with stacks of authoritarian;
and me, such a wild child barbarian seeking
both libertarian and egalitarian ideals
like equalitarian and nonsectarian, except for
agism which seemed contrarian to Yossarian
the prelapsarian in the books of Merrion.

I see centenarian as a contractarian goal
even for the Rastafarian or Merion, or the lost
latitudinarian with limited access to a seminarian
or a utilitarian agrarian humanitarian.

Look both ways with rhymes for reasons.
Mind gaps for grammarian parliamentarians
from other generations.

	Bill on Listen to This
	Dale on Listen to This
	Bill on Listen to This
	Dale on Listen to This
	purplepeninportland on Listen to This

Our Literary Journey

Driveling twaddle by an old flapdoodle.

Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt