Okay, just checking. Read at your own risk then, as usual. You might have to throw up after. Actually, it’s the last line that makes me throw up, and I would like to state clearly that it is not mine.

This week’s PrompTuesday assignment from San Diego Mamma is to write a poem including these three lines:

I tie a ribbon in a foolish way
The delicious fragility of this travesty
Where we still laugh and wish

Hmmm…. it’s possible that I should have left them as-is, and called it a non-traditional Haiku. It’s too late now, though! My efforts are below:

Second Date, Delayed
I tie a ribbon in a foolish way.
Retie it six more times for the perfect bow
at the side of my favorite skirt.
Though the miniscule part of my brain,
the hold-out still producing rational thought,
tells me no boy is going to notice.
I can still recognize, in that small fortification of reason,
the ridiculousness, the farce,
the delicious fragility of this travesty,
this hopeless waste of time.
But even as these thoughts emerge,
then pop like soap bubbles from an earlier childhood,
I have tried on two blouses, alternating, debating.
And all I really want in this mess of hope and wardrobe options
is to capture and cling to one moment where we forget
everything that’s happened since the original soap bubbles…
a single moment where we still laugh and wish.