Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Stone Soup Croutons, 8-15-16, Intent


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 morning. I've done fifty of them now, and you can read them here.

Last night was another extended open mic. I was excited to have a good roster of readers tonight. I don't usually give MVP awards out to the open micers, but I have to really thank Toni Bee, whose poetry and working of the mice got me on the roll. Given that this was a slower night, this was the first time I read my croutony poem on the open mic before James Van Looy closed us out. Here goes...


Intent

The chicken and egg fractions
gather to gang bang,
figure out who first is later.

People appropriate
this final solution
every night,

strawberries and cream
in bowls barely touched
shortcake gone soggy,

a ruby red respite
when spaghetti we worship in jest
turns authoritarian,

when you've even grown
tired of Bob Marley
being happy

and you're in ned
of more ways
to say honey.

We've already learned
all words for dirty
from our leaders' mistresses.

We know every word for recovery,
though we're sure they all
mean something less reassuring.

Town psychics answer calls to tell 
what we want to know, bunk
if they don't come to us first.

Trump is Trump,
but the overall morale
neither rises nor deflates.

Some say it's been the same
since Jimi Hendrix died
guns still in their hands

lowered half-mast
pointing to the ground,
already emptied.

Days' ends are quicker now
in the fall. Haven't they been
tortured enough?

Let them sleep in with the mothers
who draw their lives on napkins
for children to wipe their mouths.

Roads leading anywhere
are paved by road makers,
What they use is their own business.

The planets and stars above
are too high flying by
to notice the oncoming traffic.


Apologies to James Van Looy, who I didn't include because I read next-to-last.

Special Thanks to Dexter Roberts, April Penn, Toni Bee, Lee Varon, Janet Cormier, G. R. Henderson, Martha Boss, Deborah Priestly, Big Poppa Ben, and Navah The Buddaphliii. 

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