National Poetry Month--Day the 14th--I Wish, But I Am Poem--Stinking Knee--Also a Couplet--My Stompin' Knight

 

Today we're doing I wish, but I am poems. I know. Me too. So go here if you're confuseled, confustigated, or cluebatless. So here's my I Wish poem, but first, my couplet offering for your enjoyment...rofl:

MY STOMPIN' KNIGHT

When sewer cockroaches come up through the drain

Who is the man that is bringing the pain?

Forget the chocolates, the sent'ments, the flowers

It's my man doing battle protecting my showers

I hate those dank bodies disgusting and brown

Skittering, hiding, and making me frown.

I run a clean house and I don't like it mussy

So bugs uninvited cause me to be fussy.

Occasionally something intrepid, adventurous

Pops out its head, rend'ring me quite cantankerous

My blinding white knight with his 'lectric bug zapper

Goes into action while I play the napper.

I love the loud THWACK!!! as the stomper comes down

But sometimes he misses and fear comes around

Will that nasty, disgusting, impossible bug

Find me as I cower five feet off the rug?

I don't mind the occasional spider or snake

But cockroaches, of me, do a scaredy cat make

So when my GREAT husband goes into his 'mode'

Of fearless roach hunter, my feet hit the road.

Forget the dragons, or monsters so mean

My man is a fearless bug stomping machine! 

 ©2021 by H. Linn Murphy

 

STINKING KNEE

I wish that there would be a longer time between when I started to like to run and when my body fell apart.

Like a racehorse trained and groomed, who has her first race, does middling well, shows potential, then takes a disastrous fall and can never race again.

And I dream that I am still climbing, skiing, sword-fighting, and dancing.

Ah dancing. Sigh. I am jete-ing and glissading with supreme grace, pirouettes precise and breathtaking, toes turned out and pointed, tu-tu fluffed, tiara straight. Lithe and poised instead of plumpy frumpy.

I used to take every dance class I could take, and sneak into some I didn't have. I used to ski black diamond runs. I used to climb mountains with my friends, and rappel back down. I used to hike. I was a squire who once won third place in an international women's fighting competition.

But now my knee has abandoned me, aching simply to walk. I hobble about like an old crone, glad to make it around the block. 

I seem to be out of sinc somehow, not fitting the chubby old lady skin in the mirror. I look at my recalcitrant, forsaking knee and dream.

I'm really twenty five and if I turn around quickly enough I'll surprise my real self flitting back through the time rip into an alternate reality, where knees are strong and I've left half of me back here. Then I wake up.

 ©2021 by H. Linn Murphy