Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Stone Soup Croutons, 9-26-16, Hush Money


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 access them all here.

Yesterday, we attempted a type of medicine to last night's debate fiasco (which sadly didn't work given the online comments everywhere) by having Tarishi Shuler, the poet known as M.I.D.N.I.G.H.T. It was a fantastic performance and a great night. The debates loomed nontheles. And though I didn't listen until I got home, my imagination about what was happening (and what was going to happen) lingered. It lent to the piece below. Thanks for reading.


Hush Money

 Bleeding is always a tender moment
most can't handle, often enjoyed in secret
like our tattoos during work hours.

Later, we will wish to expatriate our ink,
along with all our manifestos written
after we learned racial slurs from relatives
and could say ass in a sentence without being told on.

We move to their Latin equivalents
when we're more educated.

Tonight's adult debate: Would you rather have
a moth slowly eat your clothes
over the next decade, or have a single bedbug
bit your back randomly over the same period of time.

Which one would you rather call America?
What are you willing to learn when it's all over?

Whichever you name America as providing father,
what does  your long, lost mother look like?
What will you say to her when the last sliver
of democracy is done?

Mother and Father America take you
through an amusement park, with one working game
where you pick which parent holds a holocaust
in their mouth, and which one put it there?

You either get no prize, or you don't talk about it.
You take flight without flying. You just keep leaving.


Apologies to DiDi Delgado, for not getting her name on this list.

Special thanks to Jake Tringal, Chris Fitzgerald, Dexter Roberts, Gawaine Ross, Nancy Messom, Martha Boss, Ashley Silvestre, Navah The Buddaphliii, Skoot, DiDi Delgado and James Van Looy.

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