Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Stone Soup Croutons, 6-12-17, At a Loss



Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions butchered 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. You can read the other ones I've done since 2015 here. This week marks the two year anniversary of me writing the first Stone Soup Crouton poem, which you can still read here. If you read it when it first came out, it has a title now.

Last night was another open mic and workshop. The workshop is picking up steam, and audiences picked up, even with the ridiculous weather. Here's the heat stroke influenced poem of the night.


At a Loss

Today they announced the war on Shakespeare
under the unfortunate, barely literate moniker
Operation Paradise Lost. Milton groans in his grave.

At least Nixon would have been more appropriate,
called it something like Operation Rotten Denmark,
or Winter's Tale if he missed that magic kingdom's ending.

Perhaps Robert Frost, a leftover in the war-on-words room
would have handed him off a fountain pen to sign his order
in a wild wind, evoking a tempest for further symbolism,

ignoring the cat's crawl of a silent fog though the morning,
slipping into cemeteries, death laying awake in anticipation.
Today flies rejoice, having fed on each other for too long.

The tyrants tire of years of little deaths that don't feed their army
of mortar. More solid building material is needed, fuel for the wall,
more names falling into books no one will ever read.


Not seen below right: The millions more I make in poetry every week.

Special Thanks to Chris Fitzgerald, Chris Robbins, Dexter Roberts, Toni Bee, Erik Nelson, Martha Boss, Kris Weinrich, Gawaine Ross, Nancy Messom and James Van Looy. 

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