Poem Dice
Author: gaia mouse
I am a writer, painter, potter, and photographer. I was drawn to writing late in life due to my professional life as a speech-language pathologist (SLP). This led me to an interest in language, social communication, and writing. I believe creativity heals ourselves and our society, and is a way to find an ethical, sustainable future.
Happy New Year!
How to Get Lost
- Plan an easy walk in the woods.
- Don’t forget to bring matches and knife.
- If you think there’ll be muggers bring a big knife.
- Walk on trail admiring trees, streams, and wildlife.
- Be so focused on that zen awareness of your surroundings that you forget to follow the trail markers.
- Find different color trail markers and assume that it is the same trail.
- Don’t bring a compass and whatever you do, don’t consult your phone for location. That’s cheating!
- Follow that fox or eagle.
- Realize you’re lost.
- Try to get back to your car. Hmmm…
How to Tech!
- Get a nice martini.
- Watch a video about the tech problem.
- The video expert should talk about themselves for at least 10 minutes before showing you anything.
- Make sure the person doing the video talks as quickly as a cheetah runs
- To be a real expert, the video person must say “and I just click here” at least 8 times
- Whatever they’re clicking on must be obscured.
- Get another martini.
- Make sure the video person moves the cursor too rapidly to be seen.
- All images should be too small, out of focus, or irrevelant
- Get another martini.
Baltimore Harbor
sailboats and high rises seagulls and flags water ripples in concentric circles ducks preen and squabble among themselves the sunken iron tug a nursery for ducklings clack of metal on mast tweet, hoo, cak cak call of seagull as they take flight this chipped-paint picnic table my parlor the floor littered with shells
characters for my new book
leaves
Weeds
grass resents pavement
gleefully thrusts though cracks
encourages dandelion havoc
and escaped petunias rabble rousers.
i walk in dawn
sun rising inexorably
to glint off glass skyscrapers
and church steeples.
look down
grass blades shadow each other
spiral marestail weeds
spin my gaze
rising stridently
from pavement’s weakness.
i revel
in weeds’ resistance
against the transgression
of human dominance and desire
to cover earth
with sharp angled concrete
subjugate this breathing globe
and bring us all to destruction.
June 2020, revised Dec 2021
Grasshopper in the City
Wake
wake slowly no dream soft sheets against my skin reluctant to meet clanging city i lack purpose but have plenty of work i get undressed and go back to bed
gaia mouse 