2024 Official DUP Stomp the Prompt Comp

Am I Cheating Death or Is Death Cheating Me?

Am I alive or just surviving
Waking up and going through the motions
I breathe, my heart beats
Yet I suffocate beneath the surface
Earning my share of the air in my lungs

Everything is mortgaged
I wager time and bid on my dreams
I take the risk of delays against the hope of an un-promising tomorrow
Can dimmer futures house within the light of brighter days ahead
In this world overcast of shadows

The clouds are circling to descend
Heaven is a loaded orbit
Like we’re playing roulette with the stars we provoke
How long until the gravity of depravity pulls down the sky

We fake like we’re thriving on the scraps of a rich man’s table
While we hoist the weight of our debts for financed luxuries
Every rose on loan till the cold of winter

Masquerading behind the props of our prosperity in decay
Our harvests overrun by the crush of our careless footprints
Perpetually cultivating a toxic soil
When every plant dies before it blossoms

I cannot taste the nectar for the trees that are bare
Vines dwarfed as the roots are fruitless
Spread thin for miles in an aimless sense of destination
Making ourselves at home in a wasteland

Am I alive or just surviving
Counting down with word play mutiny
I write against the mundane
Every poem is just another wilted flower…

#10

#27/30


April 27


Today is my brothers' birthday
They are twins born in 1977
One year, six months and seven days later
After my birth in 1975
My brothers and I belong
To generation X
Except for our youngest brother
Who was born in 1981
If all my siblings were alive
We would have been 11
A very  big and happy family
Now only six of us are alive

My mother has two miscarriages
Our eldest sister was born in 1963
And died at a young age of 8
Next to her was our elder brother
Who also died at a very young age
We weren't born yet when they died
So we never met them
I only saw their picture

My sister has a short curly hair
A sad eyes and brown skin
She took after my mom
Whose hair was curly
I have a fairer skin tone
I can still remember vividly
How she looked like in that old picture
Which is gone a long time ago
I do not resemble her

Mother was a fertile woman
Who was blessed with many children
So unlike me who cannot bear a child
Because of my PCOS
Which led to my surgery in 2021
For total removal of my reproductive organ
Because of some complications

Prompt # 27

Beyond the Dial

When you look at their faces you can see something appealing
Under the crystal the hands that mark time just tick away
For whatever aesthetics or complications you may be seeking
It’s the inner workings that matter most each and every day

Beneath the surface you can witness a marvel of engineering
From balance wheels and rotors to jewels and gear trains
All this inside of a barrel where you can see a mainspring
I guess you can say all these tiny parts are the brains

Every single component is important for a timepiece to work
Imagined, crafted and designed from a watchmakers’ mind
Because beyond the dial you understand there’s inner beauty
Because the hands that go around are just like the sands of time

As To Swallow or Choke Upon My Pride?

Confrontations of allegations and I silently take the heat
Tension to regurgitation on the pages of this self defeat
Redirecting the rage in a therapy of laying it all to rest
I write to ease the suffering I endure in this life comprised of stress

Disarm the mind of my emotions when logic dictates silence
As I conduct warfare in my prayers to relinquish the will for violence
Choosing joy irrespective of the circumstance
Arsenals unseen, another attack, another battle, learning how to dance

Satisfy my want to be understood by starving the need
When everyone exploits your wounds the scars within still bleed
I find defense in surrender when I choose to be the bigger man
For the sake of arguments unspoken to withstand

Nothing to prove when ranks can get away with murder of the soul
I just stay in my lane for all the things I can’t control
Finding solace in knowing everyone gets what’s coming to their door
I find confidence and yet I fear when I think of my own failures all the more

Humility to reshape perspective with hands clasped to the means
I bide my time till the reckoning and choose to make no scenes
In this world that wills for drama when I’m just trying to get along
Self control is not for the faint of heart but for the strong…

#11

Prompt # 28

The Final Bill

It’s not that I don’t have the capacity to be angry or hate
I just don’t want to put any priority or energy into this trait
Because for everything that has happened in the past
You like to linger in the emotion trying to make it last

I must admit I am human after all with the capacity to feel
But my choice to keep my reactions to myself helps me deal
What you may take as indifference I see it as a time to reflect
But I can understand if you take my silence as disrespect

Your bigotry and ignorance toward others is a sure sign
That there is something inherently wrong or on the decline
Because if you show one face here and then another there
It’s something that those around you should be made aware

I don’t have any hate for you nor do I wish you any ill will
But the universe does eventually send out the final bill
I have paid for many mistakes I made all along the way  
So the longer you delay yours the more you’ll have to pay

29/30

circle

I was sitting inside
four walls, tired
what is happening,
how do I get out of trouble?
I was surrounded by all these questions

how will I be able to pay
electricity bill, water bill, home loan
how will I be able to find
a way out of this confusing situation?

tried many times but
could not catch the butterfly
I brought the entire garden home
in the hope that
she would come and sit on my hand

impatience passed me by
I saw it staring at me
with her jewel eyes

I had lost my  patience by now
by now everything is broken
broke my ears,
broke my leg,
broke my chairs
I am losing patience now
my mind was marinating in a
batter of restlessness and anger.

I don't know what happened suddenly
time passed, breathing as if inside a black hall
my patience surprisingly brought me peace
I started walking patiently on the sands of patience
a big thing came down the stairs of the mind...

The Understudy

Identity versus image and the symbol of it all in literary scores
I am made of layers aiming to disclose
As I make myself vulnerable in the cipher of metaphors
I become someone everyone and yet no one really knows

Am I made of tragedies relative to the sentiments
As we parade our scars in the culture as if massacres are fingerprints
When in truth it goes much deeper in the character beyond what you see
Suffering is just one element in the making but affliction isn’t by definition, me

Healing informs perspectives in the ultimate end of what is left
When impenitence is brought to justice and I’m reimbursed for all the theft
My resolve is all I have to keep my character in tact
Building momentum as I follow the call to make an impact

Gifted as I am, I am driven to share
Yet not for my own sense of glory
Love is my legacy and my purpose to reveal how much I truly care
Yet I am just a character in the Author of my faith’s story…

#20

Hand In The Box

Ancestral dregs
wear on the budding mind
forcing expansion
the wake up call imminent
in each ticking minute
we face the emmissary who knew
everything antiquity taught
fully cognizant and anticipant
of the way we are to emerge
unrobing all weakness and potential
we are expected to do the unlikely
and face the disappointment
of those we try to rise to
but in the darkest weakness
entrapped by our best asset
we just might do that

       #5

Prompt # 29

By My Side

It was in those days of youth
When my emotions had held me loyal and true
And though a mountain range of obstacles lay ahead
I just knew that patience would eventually pay off

I waited and waited for her
But the choices we made carved a different path
And we went our separate and distant ways
Far apart and yet still closer to the heart

And it was after a decade
That upon seeing her face again I knew it was real
That ember never died inside of me
Remembering the emotion with all its intensity

Our time had finally come
Even if the circumstances were not so ideal
But the love I felt was at the very root of me
Even if the road ahead of us was intense
She would be my side

One Man’s Savior Is Another Man’s Devil

Do I rehash these former wounds
What benefit does it serve
When it can be far too easy to think
On the terms of what seems fair and what we don’t deserve

When truth stands to reason
Our scale is a skewed bias
Everything through the filter of our partial sense of pious

No entitlement to bitterness when we are the forgiven
Nevertheless we can all relate for the ways we’ve been betrayed
Our hearts recall the daggers for the ways we’ve been filleted

No claims to monsters lives
When we bear the blade of our own knives
We are guilty of our own share of treachery and treason
When we are both the conned and traitor in slight
We’ve all got our own demons that feed us a reason
Every friend is someone’s adversary in this fight

Personalizing the scope I zero in
After I weigh out the ways that I have hurt
Who am I to feel the way I do at times
As I excavate the fossils of this pain beneath the dirt

Nevertheless I digress in repulsion of this haunted past
As it all reopens and I become un-clasped
A question lingers like the stench of what pulls in me to vie
It remains a mystery but still I ponder why

Yet I cannot broach specifics
As I let the dead dog lie
I find no value in revisiting the splinter for the log in my own eye…

#24

Prompt # 30

A Goodbye to Rage

I am not angry anymore
I’m too old this kind of ordeal
I’ve moved into a phase where I want to keep my peace
Because getting into a battle of words
Just isn’t ideal

I took the corrective path
And sometimes that involves the law
Even if a tyranny of disagreements echoed back raging
But we’re aging and so we must cut ties
It’s time to withdraw

And the sound of that voice
It was shouting in anger trying to pour gasoline
But that old tired fire is consumed with nothing left in the pyre
As all I said calmly was “let’s just move forward”
I’m just trying to be mien

A thousand one thoughts ran
Understanding consequences would eventually come
But there’s nothing like knowing I was in control of my reactions
Because in the journey to my personal growth
To rage I will no longer succumb

The Votes are In! Congratulations, Wally, Mel, and PoetsRevenge on your excellent entries!