Stone Soup Croutons, 9-20-18, Working Out

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.

Apparently, someone upstairs was tired of the religion-themed poems I was putting up and decided to put something else into my mix. It kind of worked. Deb Priestly featured last night. Among the poems she read was a long erotic and hilarious ode written for open micer Bil Lewis and the pencil he tends to carry to events every now and then.

See?

none of the participants knew that was coming, and yet it seemed everyone that read had a piece either complimenting or in defiance to the good matured but racy material from Deb and Bil. A theme dominated the night, just as the pencil was a prevalent prop in the background of more than one picture.

It's watching you.

Both the pencil and the themes worked their way into today's poem as well, though I'm not as...daring as Deb and Bil.

And according to my poem, Dixon Ticonderoga is apparently a person. well he is at least in a work of fiction. Thanks for reading


Working Out

Did Dixon Ticonderoga 
ask his lovers to write his name
lightly with a newly sharpened pencil
so it didn't break the point?

Did Stephen Hawking yearn
for someone to whisper into his ear?
What made Leonard Cohen say hallelujah?

Do poets get love in doses of haiku
when they'd swoon for a sestina?

Do women join the covenant
yearning for a partner who, in theory
always knows what to say
or at least always listens?

On a gray day with no sun or rain
to make up its mind, do you choose
to be out because it's your kink?

This is why you go to church,
to bleat blasphemies in the pews,
look for sex in the cellars, find only
sextons seeking sanctuary
telling you to pipe down upstairs

like when neighbors would while you were
laying pipe (your girlfriend's words,
not yours, not your thing),

your passion less a double rainbow
of stain glassed confession
and more like cloud cover,

substituting the steam
of a fantasy girl's locker room
for rain coming down on your car
hard enough to conceal windows.

You no longer need a lover or priest
to banish you into submission,
just an I love you written on a napkin
instead of an online post.

Special thanks to Bil Lewis, Martha Boss, Chris Fitzgerald, David Miller, Carol Weston, Laurel Lambert, Julia Vogel and James Van Looy.