Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Stone Soup Croutons, 10-19-15, Un



Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions picked up from poems overheard from Stone Soup's open mic readers and features. I figure out a title the next morning. Or evening, in this case.

I am late this week and lacking confidence, having not posted anything for a couple of weeks. It's been a busy month, and I've started setting up live streams of Stone Soup Poetry nights, open mic and all. When I did the first one for the SOUPed Up Beat Poetry Festival, I was too busy to take notes. That was enough to get me out of practice, and I skipped writing anything for Jeannie Nunes's feature. At least they are recorded and accessible now, so I might watch them and write something later.

This week, we had the return of Hannah Brown! Though I was far from refreshed from the weekend or the work day, I was able to pick up the pen again. I was tired enough that I ended up writing a line or two that didn't make sense to me (that commas and parentheses one? Yeah...), but I did my best to keep them in. Here is the poem.


Un

Our lives never have a title.
We believe we can slap it
on at the end.
 No one wants to see their
draft in progress.

We type while looking away
and would look in horror to see titles
like This Is The Story 
of a Male Progressive
Who Made Everyone He Dated 
Vote Republican

or The Pick Up Artist 
Who Birthed A Thousand Old Maids.

Your bottle's on the table,
poison to kill poison,
poor man's chemo.

There are no step by step programs
to recover lost potential.

You pay rent to be homeless.
You spend days retracing your footprints
wondering where in the sand
God picked you up and threw you down.

This is not where you want to be
if the future were kinder.

When you say you have a block,
people look at you
and pretend it's not real
because it's metaphor.

That's when you change your title.
If anyone could look and ask why,
you'd say it was missing something.

The page in front of you, excised
of gerunds, comas and parentheses.

In it is only one word
never there before.




Special thanks to Lee Varon, Lisa Bolduc (aka Ratty), Silent E, Martha Boss, DiDi Delgado, Ryan Carzzi, Dexter, Jonathan J. Joseph, and Chris Fitzgerald.

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