My two roommates and I are builders.
We build each other up, and have a great time.
We decide we need another roommate.
Teddy applies. He is quiet, but calm.
His references are glowing.
We invite him to room with us.
Teddy is a demolisher.
We take care of things.
He destroys them.
We are free-spirited creators.
He is grouchy and tries to extinguish our joy.
We finally have to ask him to move out.
We discover later that his glowing recommendation was from his mother.
He set fire to her place when she kicked him out.
(a story in senryu stanzas)
I get migraines.
- lucky me - glare can set me
off within seconds.
I always have a
pair of dark, polarized shades
with me - it’s a quirk.
When I was fourteen,
we lived in Shenzhen, China
very near Macau.
Macau, China, the
“Las Vegas” of Asia, is
the home of glare.
The Ritz-Carlton, has
a glittering galaxy
of bright chandeliers.
Those chandeliers move,
their silhouettes change shape - just
stab me with a spork.
Did I mention the
Mirrors? Every wall served to
magnify the light.
“You look awful,” my
mom said - our two week booking
became ten minutes.
“I just need sunnies,
those would work,” *then I gasped*
“I’ll look glamorous!”
We changed hotels, but
what a small world - my roommate
Leong grew up there.
We could have passed in
the yè shì as teenagers
and now we're roommates.
.
.
sunnies = sunglasses (UK slang)
yè shì = night market (simplified Chinese)
His aspiration to be couple
Which defined might maketh
Him lonely
That I might be a sweet remind
That he should suffer from his
Labors
And mi act to be define
He chorest me that must suffer
That I beyond his brow
He chorest me
That I am whore
And his his wants
Are that of thou
He chorest me
To what ending
That who's money
I have found
He chorest me
Might he labor
And mi need
Be with thou
I have whored in parts
To make suffer
Those who wish to
To love and leave
I have tasked to bring
Asunder men who wish
To be with me
Who chorest me
Must I labor
To have men
Want for me
He chorest me
My whitest behavior
Has a world
To look to me
My new college roommate was a fancy woman
She brought the most interesting pieces of furniture
I had never seen such magnificence, and I told her
She laughed at my delight in her “simple things”
They were simple to her because she was an artist.
Not simple to me by any means. I was delighted and enthralled.
Loving her daisy-decorated dresser and her mermaid bed.
Creativity bounced all over the room now.
She grew up and continued to be fancy.
We grew apart, but kept in touch.
I went to visit her twenty years later.
And there was her fancy daisy-decorated dresser.
“Put it into your car,” she told me.
“You always loved it more than I did.”
I did and was ever so glad as it was our last visit.
She passed from cancer a few months later.
That was thirty years ago.
I have kept her dresser in the best shape.
Loving my memories of her.
Never forgetting her artistic flair and her generous ways.
there is a cotton feeling to it:
the same sheets
the same bed
still looking for a song
that doesn’t exist yet.
the door closes quietly, pushed not.
I think of a comfortable ending—
the ghosts under my skin agree.
a comfortable ending
a concerned mother
a cotton feeling
The "poem length police have nabbed me again - so I had to put my new piece
"Sunny"
in the story story section.
Here's the URL:
https://www.poetrysoup.com/short_stories/sunny_9449
I posted a new story poem - too long for here - look under short stories
Maybe this link will work…
https://www.poetrysoup.com/short_stories/lunch_crush_9333
Sunny and her love-object have broken up.
It was a selfie-inflicted wound - a slapdash pic taken,
that like a puzzle, revealed more than intended.
We try and be thoughtful and considerate but
we’ve only recently escaped from captivity.
Perfectly nice people are capable of unfaithful deeds.
Isn’t that what so much of great literature is about?
Our lives are written in disappearing ink,
and it’s not as if all kisses are meaningful.
We stretch for happiness or for fleeting pleasure
- we’re not married and only vaguely committed.
What would tempt you - what could you actually resist at 18?
Or now - but maybe you’re a saint.
Leong (one of my roommates) squirms up to me at breakfast, in the cafeteria.
“May I ask..,” she said, looking around like a secret agent getting ready to make a dead-drop, “what contraceptives do you use?”
I thought this an odd question from someone who just broke up with her long-time boyfriend but, hey, I’m an open book.
“Isolation and despair,” I replied, which got me an eye roll.
“You’re never serious!” She admonishes me.
My houseplant committed suicide.
It came out of the blue - or at least - I didn’t catch the signs.
I’d put it on my window ledge so it could catch some sun
- it appeared to be having a good time.
I brushed it with my elbow - the wispy kiss of a butterfly
and it leapt to its shattering end - I never will know why.
The girl it barely missed, looked up - in accusatory alarm.
“What if that had been a BABY!” I yelled, to keep her calm.
We had a terra-cotta funeral - my roommates seemed really sad -
and a reception where no plant-life was consumed.
Lisa, acted quickly - she’s a fashionable 911
and at the funeral she buried the corpse, in a new pot, in her room.
Roommate mosquito
waits for me to hit the sack
turns to a vampire,
my hand strikes as a hammer,
it flies out, I break my neck.
______________
August : 30, 2021
Contest : A Buggy Tanka Contest
Sponsor : M.L. Kiser
Unhealthy human body, fighting its owner, in need of a Goldsmith
months of hygiene malpractice, now counting as the sixth,
his blanket of microflora possesses a morgue beneath
weeks without touching water, despite the pretense quite stealth
one, five, seven, nine; already getting umpteenth.
From 03:18am to 20:16 hours; the evidence of my anger’s width
awful smell, recites loud acrostics from low esteem teeth
and the rate of hang-over vomitus, beats any myth,
last month was 89; already 83, ten days later, is this filth
my mathematics can’t be wrong, rent expires on the fifteenth.
Roommate is on my plate
Dropping herself into my grits
Little flecks of warm porridge splash into my eyes
It is one of Trixie’s assistant muses
She has a killer smile and rainbow hair
Hi she greets me with telepathy
Lump of eggs rises
I see two glowing green eyes
Getting higher and taller.
Fascinated I smile
Wondering what will happen next
Grape jelly jar falls over with a clink next to plate.
“She is comin!” A tiny red brownie driving gem encrusted chariot hisses.
Rainbow muse and mini-dragon jump aboard the chariot
Trixie my main muse is riding black puma with stars chasing them now
Her head turns toward me. She glares and sticks out her tongue.
The perils of having a hopped up overly territorial muse
I cringe wondering what diabolical fate will next befall me.
When your baby leaves home you are either overjoyed or sad.
I was overjoyed, until I could not reach her on her phone for days,
and then a week, and then ten days.
Her roommate said her stuff was there, but
“I never see her.”
I asked if she could tell whether or not she had been there recently,
and she told me that she could not.
These were pre-texting days. My helpless eighteen-year-old daughter
was four hours away from home, at a college she had chosen. I was worried,
so I called everybody including the phone company down there. I asked everyone to put
a note on her dorm door, telling her to call her mother.
We got a call that night from an angry daughter who said this
to her dad, “What does Mom want?”
She was embarrassed and irritated that six people had yelled at her to call her
mother, and there were two notes stuck to her door that
said ‘call your mother’ - one from the phone company.
Six people who cared. Six strangers I do not know. Six angels.
I wondered which four did not step up.
(none fiction)
A roommate from hell, I will never forget.
It first started out nice until "he" was touch
by a demon from hell.
We became enemies, I figured what the hell.
That's when I realized it was touched by the demon from hell.
He was possess and seduce by the demon from hell.
So the roommate from hell became a nightmare at his best.
He started doing drugs, smoking marijuana like a lost soul.
For as we became enemies, his new friend was the demon from hell.
I do not know why but that seems to happen to every roommate I've had.
I am glad I have my own, so it wouldn't corrupted my son too.
I will never forget the roommate from hell and his demon for all they have done. For he had stole my gold bracelet with my name on it that my mom had given me for he couldn't accept been defeated.
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