1: living room

Tiny russet spots
dance like molecules
over the mushroom
expanse of my overstuffed
couch
a rug braids its oval self
on top of long thin slats of oak
staggered together side by side
flooring my world

floor to ceiling shelves spill
over with books, a Buddha, and dragons
budded stems
pruned from a sweet Adelaide rosebush
waft scents from a
knotty pine table with sturdy square
legs that tame the
red yellow green tan
threads ovaling beneath it
my father fashioned the table magic
with a lid that hinges open on springs
pull the top up and
work or eat in luxury
in front of our big ass plasma television
that frightened me when it first arrived
but gradually became the norm
in the morning it sits quietly
while words find their way from the air to my computer

2: pianos and birds

In the great room
Sophia swings and squawks the morning alive
a pirate parrot, queen of the salty sea
her red life drowns itself dry
in a house in Montana
feathered friend
sorrow surrounds you
in me
my super sweet wish is to see you fly free

sometimes the birds and I sing
while their pupils dilate and constrict
we rock out the long morning hours of summer
later Len rips out ragtime tunes on the Baldwin upright
as LB the black-cheeked conure bobs and weaves on his shoulder
when he switches to Beethoven or old Christian hymns
LB swoons

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The prompt from Pamela Sayers and We Write Poems asked that we record observations, preferrably from the place where we write. I write on the couch in the living room, usually when I’m home alone so the tv is off. 🙂 The birds’ squawking is always nearby.

Jim Morrison’s poetry illuminates Slithering Sal (the lizard-gal) as she lay in the velvet lined faux cage Jerzy the circus smith fashioned her from steel with swirls of color that dance along the bars on nights that Luna shows her full round face. To Be Alone* is hers—she whisper sings it to the empty grounds from her pillowed luxury place,

practices until it becomes her. Sal gets Morrison. She gets him like no one else, and not once has she listened to The Doors. She loves to hiss the s sounds in his words as her tail coils its way across her chest.

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She’s back! Slithering Sal started in G-Man’s Friday Flash 55. To Be Alone is a Morrison poem provided in Saturday Celebrations at One Stop Poetry. I’m calling this a prose poem. I don’t know if Sal’s done with me yet, or not, but I like her. Thanks for reading.

This carnivorous gastropod’s
rasping tongue cleans the shell
of its bivalve cousin
before it retracts its
fleshy tentacles
and hides in the mud
to digest that mollusk’s clammy flesh.
It seldom wonders why it behaves
this way, it just does.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is my entry for this week’s Magpie Tales. Thanks for the photo, Tess. For inspiration, I researched the shell here, and also clicked on the crown shell photo there for more information.