Stone Soup Croutons, 5-4-18, Bottom Feeders

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. 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 up because it's Friday morning Monday morning the following week.  

Wait, what?

Last Friday night, Stone Soup moved to its new time on Friday night from its new location at St. Paul's Cathedral. I ended up waiting until today to finish and post the poem. Partly because I knew no one would be likely to read it on the weekend. Partly because I tend to stop writing and editing on the weekends, doing so much of it over the course of five days every week.I owe Carol Weston thanks for letting me take snapshots of the poems she read, so certain words stuck in my memory. The videos I recorded helped too, of course. This one got weird, but I kind of liked that.


Bottom Feeders

America's new trinity
bomb, bomb and bomb away.

It's time for the x
in my generation
to have more letters,
a name, a title.

The mental block
is self-imposed
diving nautilus
ammonite fossilized
before it's time.

We are not leaders,
but Uber drivers
bringing young revolutionaries
to the next fight
we abandoned.

We scare the children
who when they arrive
crawl away from
where we'd rather stay.

We're not the good guys,
we're not even truly neutral,
the weight of our inertia
threatening to crush the shell
we think protects us form choice.

We're back.

Special thanks to Jan Rowe, Erik Nelson, Melissa Silva, John Bergstrom, Carol Weston, Martha Boss, Nancy Messom, Navah The Buddaphliii, Bil Lewis and James Van Looy.