Poetry Thursday: Advice and Appreciation and a Mini Progress Report

This weeks (CATO) prompt for Poetry Thursday (based on an idea I mentioned - Yay!) is to write a poem based on words you love or words you hate or both. Naturally I really like this idea! BUT (c'mon, y'all knew there'd be a "but", right?) I've discovered that no matter how much I like the PT prompts, I need more than the time from Monday to Thursday to complete one. So I've started making notes to myself and working on something, but I can't give you a Love/Hate/(both?) poem today. I'll revisit this prompt another week. Hopefully it'll be a week when I don't have so much going on as I do this week. This room is STILL not truly finished, but I'm continuing to work on it and tomorrow I'll post some pics whether it's done or not. Pppffftt. Yesterday I had to take a break from it to go to town and buy groceries, because no matter how busy we are, J seems to think we still need to eat every single day. Sheesh. Men! And I really think soon I'm going to have to take another break from this room and do a little work on the rest of the house. I've been letting it slide even more than usual (and I am not, under the best of circumstances, exactly a perfect housekeeper!!), and I think the dustbunnies have reached invasion proportions and are starting to hatch a takeover plot. ANYWAY...before I jump back into this seemingly neverending project I'll share a couple of short poems with you. The first one is one I wrote in response to a contest Lizardek ran on her blog a few weeks ago. Her brother was getting married and Liz requested that her readers give him some bits of advice for a long and happy marriage. But the contest was that the advice had to be in the form of a poem and it had to rhyme - no free verse. I came up with a bit of important wisdom and put it into limerick form and submitted it and I won the contest! Yay! (Thanks Liz and Liz Elayne, who was the wise and discerning judge.) This is what I won: (It's an incense burner from Germany.) And this is the advice I wrote: If ever your wife asks of thee "Is that girl hotter than me?" Don't think and don't sigh, Just quickly reply, "She's not and she never could be." And here's a poem I like and that suits my current mood of paring back on Stuff and appreciating what I have. To a Poor Old Woman munching a plum on the street a paper bag of them in her hand They taste good to her They taste good to her. They taste good to her You can see it by the way she gives herself to the one half sucked out in her hand Comforted a solace of ripe plums seeming to fill the air They taste good to her. ~~~William Carlos Williams Today's Daily Art Thang has absolutely nothing to do with either poem (the time thing again!) but is one of my rejected Pop Art self-portraits that I won't be able to use for the SPC challenge because there aren't enough Tuesdays in June. So I'll share it here instead. "Self-Portrait in White(-ish)" (clickable if you want to see it larger in a new window)