Stone Soup Croutons, 7-11-16, All Last Straws

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 (and sometimes the rest of the poem) later. To paraphrase Lorne Michaels, the poem doesn't go up because it's good; it goes up because it's Tuesday Wednesday. Clearly I need to rethink the deadline of this series. I may post on Wednesdays or later due to snags in my routine as of late.

Dexter Garcia read to a packed audience Monday night. It was anyone and everyone on the mic. One of those night's I'm too busy and occupied to keep names straight, let alone jot down everything that is said. I hope I captured something from the night, which was the first Stone Soup gathering following a series of tragic killings. The vibe of social justice was prevalent, even if it wasn't the direct theme of everyone's poems.

Usually, I have difficulty capturing and using lines from these highly emotional and personal works focusing on race. The closest I've come so far was a poem written partly in reaction to an audience member challenging DiDi Delgado in the middle of her reading on the open mic. Hopefully I did something better here. At least I'm resolved to document this theme better.

I ended up basing the "You" in the poem on a particularly creepy Uber driver Dexter described in one of her poems. Credit also goes to DiDi who remembered and quoted a line from Angelica Maria Aguilera on her Facebook wall, otherwise I might not have remembered it. I thank everyone on the open mic and list you below whether or not I remembered and/or used your words.


All Last Straws 

After your final staged outburst
your bitch baby thinks you can stand
and hump the empty air forever.

You tell her all deaths matter
just to try and sound clever on Facebook.

She is loud, loud, louder than any statistics
lifted from Donald Trump's Twitter.

You fall from your ex-lover's giant owl,
her fantasy barely able to keep herself aloft.

The books confirm it. You're broken.
You'll heal. Thanks.

Through one stage of grief your raise
chickens  to show you are capable
of letting something grow
so  you can kill it. For you, it's a start.

The next stage goes from jelly fish stings
to an atom bomb immolation,

from not yelling racial epithets
 at the store owner's children

to not cursing yourself out
in front of your reflection
in the window of your Uber driver.

That doesn't mean the old you
doesn't have to go sometime,
as if euthanasia was ever done out of love.

One your old self's dead that's when
the rest can harvest old ground
with your life's worth of shit. 

The crocodiles will no longer
produce your party favor tears.

If you think all deaths matter
start with your own.

Special Thanks (in order of the list, which is in no way related to the order of who actually read) Rachael Eisenberg, Chris Fitzgerald, Lee Varon, Rich H. Skoot, Surat, Avery, Erik Nelson, David Miller, Martha Boss, Gladys Hidalgo, D. Ruff, Paola Mendez, Angelica Maria Aguilera, Yvonne, DiDi Delgado, Big Poppa Ben, Ny, Kofi Atsimerv, Carol Weston, James Van Looy, Dexter Garcia, and K.