It's Lonely in the Birdhouse

 I bought this glass house

thinking exposure would bring connection. 

In this curtainless cube

the traffic outside my window

is much like a flock of birds

feeding on the view, but never

knocking on the door to deliver a voice.

Surely a doll in a box will at least

bring the curious, perhaps a single person

who would want to know if there is

human flesh on the arm that waves,

but GPS doesn’t allow veering

from programmed directions. 

Is time still real? Is it selfish

to feel broken enough to cry, 

or wish for a pen so I could

imagine myself through poetry?

I’ve lived long enough to reach

the future…It’s so much colder since

caring about one another became obsolete. 

©Susie Clevenger 2025

“The question is not whether intelligent

 machines can have any emotions,

 but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions.”

—Marvin Minsky, 1986

Shay's Word Garden Word List ~ Klara and the Sun

Sleepless in December

Insomnia has me at my window

watching moonlight in a flowerless garden

turn dead stems into haunted skeletons.

I feel the goodbye of petals that once

scented the starfields of night, phantoms

of bright color and perfume sacrificed for winter.

Melancholy deposits its chill along my skin

in pearls of grief because I too feel the frailness

of my resilience to push through the loam

of the coming year seeded with questions.

I’ve pruned the panic of November with

dull scissors down to manageable resistance.

Well, that's what I tell myself in the moments

my teeth aren't clinched with sarcasm.

I curse the dictionary for giving space 

to the word unbearable…It stalks my vocabulary.

Also unprecedented has become a weed word for malicious. 

©Susie Clevenger 2024

Shay's Word Garden Word List ~ Mark Strand

 

Ink and Pad Women

"Relax, " said the night man, "We are programmed to receive

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave"

Hotel California ~ The Eagles

There are too many waitresses

in hell, the beck and call, never seem

to get it right, tenders of a menu

that eyes read, but never accept,

“It is what it is.”

It’s not the ladies’ fault the greasy

walls wreak of rehab, and gluttony.

Everyone who takes a seat at a half wiped

table is nursing an addiction of some sort.

Truck stops at the end of the line

rarely see diamond desperados, because

those types like to spend their plastic

where their Prada doesn’t stick to the chair. 

None of the ink and pad women volunteered

to be called the queens of bad examples or

should I say calloused assumptions. 

Each one has a dream, a heart, a hope,

a circumstance they want out of, and

an eye on a view that isn’t in the shadow

of the Hotel California. 

©Susie Clevenger 2024

Shay's Word Garden Word List ~ Warren Zevon

 

2 Poems One List

I created both of these poems from the same word list.

 I wasn't sure I liked the first one 

so I decided to make an attempt at another one.

 I couldn't decide which to post so I just posted both of them.

Not Every Quote in the Throat

Some would like their claws in my jaws,

pour sour lemons in my tea to see

if I can hold on to every blue note I sing.

So many times, the rhymes hit a target

too close to truth and they want to turn loose

their anger on me because I found the music.

Not every quote in the throat is made to sugar

a day into a peppermint experiment of mindless escape,

but if a listener stays long enough to hear it becomes clear

we’re both hanging from a rope trying to cope 

and it’s often a song that unites instead of divides us.

©Susie Clevenger 2024

South Texas Can’t Sugar Tea a Snowman

Christmas feels more like

a month of summer than

snowflakes on a windowsill.

South Texas doesn’t like

to give up its heat, or lead

a hand to a cup of hot cocoa

teased with peppermint.

Walking down a Houston street

in December is muggy July jazz

dressed in a t-shirt trying

to convince the body it’s a sweater.

We Texans like a lot of sugar in our tea,

insult it with a slice of lemon, and

dance around bigger is better. 

But we get a bit jealous that

the only time it feels cold enough

to build a snowman is when

we pull ice cream out of the freezer. 

©Susie Clevenger 2024

Shay's Word Garden Word List ~ Ishmael Reed

 

MotherLine

The Emancipation of Eve ~ Digital Collage ~ by Susie Clevenger

You can bury my bones,

but I’ll still breathe.

No matter how many

voices try to talk my mind blind,

I’ve been cradled in women's wisdom

even before I was born.

Eyes wide awake, hand to the pen

paper smells of ink, ocean stinks of men.

There’s no lift in a hand that only

touches bottom, or change when

a wheel moves backwards

in a world moving forward.

My feet don’t like to dance a loop.

My head hates dizzy, my body 

argues in the forced stand still.

You can bury my bones,

but I’ll still breathe.

Keep trying to talk me blind,

I’ll keep forcing you to see. 

©Susie Clevenger 2024

Shays' Word Garden Word List ~ The Return of Ellie Black

Sunday Sarcasm of Grumbles – Truth in My Fiction

 

The phrase, just a bump in the road,

aggravates me because it doesn’t address

the times the road caves in, and I really

need a flashlight to find where my feet have landed.

I’m not always the director of my drama.

Life too often of late has channeled Martin Scorsese 

to turn my latest travesty sequel into a movie that runs out

of popcorn before the opening credits have stopped scrolling.

I’m jealous of the fourteen-year-old me who filled

a diary with nothing, but whining about being fat,

and how life was soooo unbearable without a boyfriend.

A rainy Sunday and arthritis are perfect guests

for my tea party of grumbles, my why’s, and damn it’s.

Therapists sing the song of how wrong 

it is to keep pent up emotions inside,

speak or journal them.

Welcome to my therapy!

I think I might just be one of the elderly women

Scarlet O’Hara went on about … I’ve tossed the corset

and put more lemon in my lemon biscuits. 

Ok, I must confess I do feel a fit of cackles teasing my pout.

My mood matches my hair, gray, unruly, and denying

I’m the hornet queen of my own nest. 

©Susie Clevenger 2024

Shay's Word Garden List ~ The Last to Go

Bamboo Spurts and Bones

Mora has a heart of bones,

a never more obsidian crow stare

that has seen more than 

she wanted, and less than she dreamed.

In the yellow cornsilk days of unaware

she grew in bamboo spurts of too

much too soon, a pink lipped dreamer

who tasted vinegar when he was smiling sugar.

She is not kiss and tell, more graveyard dirt and spell.

Pain has lessons. Healing has strength.

The he of hell is living his consequences.

Mora is thriving in forgive but never forget. 

©Susie Clevenger 2024

Shay's Word Garden Word List ~ She Had Some Horses