Shared with Melissa’s FFFC #351 picture prompt
Puppy Love – 18th December 2025
Tag: poem
he doesn’t know it’s Christmas
You Can’t See Me When I Close My Eyes – 17th December 2025
Shared with dVerse Quadrille #238 – hibernate.
The initial line is taken from Jae Rose’s poem ‘Coax’.
It is hard to
live fully above ground.
The nail that sticks
up gets hammered down.
Protected in silent procrastination
like a seasonal hibernation,
sleeping through until cessation.
When things settle down
I’ll return once more,
But until then, I’m
waiting for the thaw.
Belly Up – 16th December 2025
The belly up dog
rolls in recognition;
celebrating the leash,
revelling in submission.
In a democratic house,
its institutions sing
“we are free” until
it doesn’t mean anything.
The belly up dog
doesn’t need to be told
he’s free to roam
the lonely nights of cold.
Inspired by a couple of quotes:
we now live in an era when the slaves celebrate their slavery.
Nick Tosches
Democracy is a con game. It’s a word invented to placate people to make them accept a given institution. All institutions sing, ‘We are free.’ The minute you hear ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, watch out because in a truly free nation, no one has to tell you you’re free.
Jacque Fresco
Plateau – 15th December 2025
What is a tableau?
Quick searching Google
brought me a surprise;
expecting paintings,
all I got was graphs
exploring data.
So the world has changed,
words have new meanings.
I wanted pictures
frozen at a time
of great importance,
to inspire a write.
Shared with dVerse MTB – tableau.
I know what a tableau is but went searching for something in particular to write about. I guess, in one way, I found it.
Honesty On Stage – 14th December 2025
Dreams
shape reality.
Stories need people,
the weavers of words;
the satisfaction with joyous ending?
Rising curtains, actors playing people, real
royalty and fakers, forging fortune for applause.
Bright lights shine, eyes glittery, all silvery struck.
So, stage mirrors life stories, untold, often repeated, become
so
real?
The
mask,
the
role,
mask
the
real.
So
become repeated often, untold stories. Life mirrors stage, so
struck silvery, all glittery eyes shine, lights bright;
applause for fortune forging fakers and royalty!
Real people playing actors? Curtains rising,
ending joyous with satisfaction. The
words of weavers. The
people need stories.
Reality shapes
dreams.
What a headache! A palindrome poem that is almost a double etheree. I gave up at the tenth line and had to enlist AI to give me ideas to connect the two etherees. It kinda works. I think the theme here is apparent but due to the structure of the palindrome, the specifics are a little bit lost. Does the formatting help or hinder?
This poem was prompt #10 for the Chimeric Poetry Scavenger Hunt, which I’m slowly working my way through. No more palindromes for me!
The Moral Dirt – 13th December 2025
Inspired by a short piece by Samuel Butler in the Penguin Book of Lies. A rich source of inspiration!
Cherry picking the words of god
to suit man’s selfish needs;
The lowest forms twist their meaning
until the lie succeeds;
Imitators of good virtue
are such great pretenders;
The sweetest mouth is shameful with
every lie it renders;
As it passes into the ears,
the falsehood becomes true;
Before we die, the moral dirt
must be ingested too.
Humbled – 12th December 2025
Made of smokestacks and trusses,
interlocking and rectilinear;
Naves are wandering the new brick streets,
humbled by shelter, by pressure.
Solidarity in civic identity,
iron tasted on the tongue;
Dwarfed by an engineered order,
humbled by progress, by claustrophobia.
Such industry held up on hills,
dormitories are bent and sooty brown;
Anonymous postures pause conversations,
humbled by pride, by fatigue.
Shared with W3 #189 – picture prompt
A Little Something – 11th December 2025
Who puts the meaning
into the gift – is it the
giver or receiver?
I made this for you.
I wrote this poem for you,
whether you want it or not.
A mondo shared with Tanka Tuesday #42 – gift
Free For All – 10th December 2025
Here, my life in words
writ upon musty pages:
the human condition catalogued
on a day-to-day basis.
All the devilled details
each stanza engages;
these eternal tales retold,
elevated among the sages.
When to tragedy
I will surely fall,
my words will live on,
free for all.
Written for Melissa’s FFFC #350 picture prompt
The Useless Tree – 9th December 2025
Inspired by the parable of the Useless Tree and shared with Poetic Bloomings #571 – Nothing But Trees:
Carpenter Shi was travelling through the countryside with his young apprentice when they came upon a village shrine built around an enormous oak tree. The tree was ancient beyond measure, its trunk so vast that a thousand men holding hands couldn’t encircle it. Its branches spread like a green cathedral, offering shade to the entire village square.
The apprentice stood transfixed. “Master!” he called excitedly. “In all my travels, I’ve never seen timber so magnificent! Why won’t you even look at it?”
Carpenter Shi barely glanced up from his path. “Worthless wood,” he muttered dismissively. “Make boats from it and they’ll sink. Make coffins and they’ll rot before the bodies do. Make tools and they’ll break in your hands. Make houses and they’ll be eaten by worms. It’s completely useless—that’s the only reason it’s lived so long.”
The carpenter continued on his way, but that night the great tree appeared to him in a dream.
“What are you comparing me to?” asked the tree. “Fine trees like cherry and pear? Those trees that bear fruit are attacked the moment they ripen. Their branches are broken, their bark is stripped. Their very usefulness makes their lives miserable, cutting short their natural span. This happens to all things.
“I’ve been working for ages to become perfectly useless. I nearly died several times in the attempt, but I’ve finally succeeded. My uselessness is now my greatest usefulness. If I had been useful, do you think I could have grown this large?
“Besides, you and I are both just things in this world. How can one thing judge another? You’re a dying man who understands nothing—what could you know about a useless tree?”
When Carpenter Shi awoke, he told his apprentice about the dream. The young man was confused: “If the tree wants to be useless, why does it serve as a shrine?”
The master smiled. “Quiet! It’s simply taking shelter there. Those who don’t understand it might harm it otherwise. If it weren’t a shrine tree, wouldn’t it be in danger of being cut down? Its way of preserving itself is different from ordinary trees, so using conventional standards to judge it will lead us far astray.”
On the surface, this story seems to be about different definitions of value—the carpenter sees lumber, the tree sees survival. But dig deeper and you discover something revolutionary: the tree has found freedom through strategic uselessness.
What if our quirks, our imperfections, our refusal to fit standard molds aren’t bugs in our programming but features? What if the very things that make us “unemployable” in one context make us invaluable in another?
1994ever 