Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Stone Soup Croutons, 9-18-17, Poets as Cowards



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. To paraphrase Lorne Michaels, this poem doesn't go up because it's ready, it goes on because it's Tuesday morning.

Last night was another all-open mic. It was a good time for all. I'm sorry that the poem was a little more positive. I mostly spurred from a joke I keep on cracking about poets being too scared to take the number one slot. Who am I to talk anyway? I've been participating in the open mic lately, and I don't put my name on the list at all!

Poem follows. Thanks for reading.


Poets as Cowards

We wait to be reborn
by mail order machine god,
brought to journey's end
without a single step.

We know even a river
can kill us, a pool
we walk by at night
will strangle us while
moon's reflection keeps watch.

Even a puddle causes panic
more than hang gliding
over Nixon's Hanoi.

Rather than put words to walls
we hurl them to the wind,
hope they obstruct our tracks.

Let us paralyze ourselves
and be carried home
so our feet make no marks.

Behind the rock where
we hid our courage,
Jesus Christ and Karl Marx
refuse to budge.

Each nudges the other
to go out first and meet
the first-stone holding masses.


Cowards! Cowards all of us!

Special thanks to Michael McAfee, Martha Boss, Tichaona Chinyelu, Michael Igoe, Bil Lewis, Nancy Messom, Lee Varon and James Van Looy

2 comments:

Gawaine said...

That is such an excellent poem, Chad.I really mean that. It's one of the best poems I've read in quite a while.

Anonymous said...

Mind twisting! Thanks for sharing.