noir

Devastating Tale

lillian33 Comments

Scam artist ~
preyed on teenage girls.
Sarah was smitten.
Invited to the party,
good and plenty ripe
with handsome bachelors
all waiting to score.

Twenty years her junior,
mints in his pocket
to wash away whiskey breath,
he sidled up to her.
Join me outside?
I’m not into alcohol
not into these wild parties.

She believed him.
Chatted gamely as they left.
Went to his penthouse hotel room.

Next day, found by the maid.
Strangled, disheveled, damaged.
But he was long gone.
On the kitchenette counter,
unopened Oreos package, glass of milk,
Duds and Suds business card
propped up by the toaster.

Handwritten message on the card:
I like ‘em young. Listen to their dreams.
All of ‘em wanna be sugar babies,
I just make it happen.
Catch me if you can.
Love to all,
Mr. Goodbar

Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today I’m hosting and listing 27 candy bars/candies and asking folks to include at least one in their poem. If the candy includes the word “bar/bars”, those words can be eliminated…but the candy name must be used exactly as it is. No words can be added between the words in the name.

Apologies for the darkness of this poem….sometimes my words go to the dark side. Perhaps it’s all the Jeffrey Epstein stories in the news right now. I know this is a frightening poem, even though it uses the following candies: Good and Plenty, Junior Mints, Milk Duds, Sugar Babies and Mr. Goodbar. I do not mean to make light of the Epstein files and their relationship to #47. It is a horrible story and one that must completely be released to the public. Again, apologies but the poem just came from my pen. My first poem for this prompt is MUCH HAPPIER!

Image made on Bing Create.

Another Bloody Case

lillian20 Comments

“Look at the image there. You can see a very small patch of dark blue, framed by a little branch. Pinned up by a naughty starlet, our dead Ms. Ruby Lipps here. Looks like she was stabbed, then managed to turn around to face the call board. She reached up to touch that photo for some reason? That’s gotta be her blood trail down the board, down the wall, until she collapses here on the floor. By her hand, is that a bloody word? Maybe three letters? Looks like M, O or D? Then a T? Who keeps the schedule here? How many clients did she have tonight? Any employment records at this dump? What’s her real name? Next of kin? Let’s go, people. This is the third case like this in a week. Someone’s got it out for sex workers in this town.”

Image by Nicholas Panek from Pixabay

Written for Prosery Monday at dVerse, the virtual pub for writers around the globe.

Today Kim is our host. She asks us to insert the following lines from French Poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud’s poem Novel, into the body of our piece of flash fiction of 144 words or less, sans title.

“There you can see a very small patch
of dark blue, framed by a little branch,
pinned up by a naughty star.”

We may change the punctuation in the lines, but the exact words and word order must be kept intact.

As the Sun Sets on this Day

lillian22 Comments

On craggy cliff I stand,
do not come round me.
Life spins round and round until
I sit in darkness.
So many footlights burned out.
I was never there, the day everything changed.
My kaleidoscope memories,
image blurs reality.
I’m skywriting now,
while Mother sings about the man in the moon.
Cold creeps up.


Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today Laura presents a truly challenging prompt.

We are to look back at all our poems posted in the months of January through November 2023, and write a “found poem”. Where do we find it? From the first lines of the first verses, of all the poems from 2023! BUT, we must use one poem’s first line from each month – January, February, March, etc, through November – hence an 11 line poem! The lines can be used in any order. They don’t have to be January, February, March, April, etc. Mine ended up October, April, August, June, February, January, September, May, March, November, November. I was allowed to use two from one month because I didn’t post any poems in July as we were travelling. The title must be the first line of the first verse from a poem in December 2023, or from any other month in 2023. Since I only posted twice in December, I again used a line from a November poem. So this is what I ended up with! Image created in Bing Create. 

PS: it was fun to go back and see all the poems I wrote in 2023! I usually write such positive poems…this one surprised me.