Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions picked 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.
I also have a book out now collecting the best of my first year of poems. Click here to purchase it.
To paraphrase Lorne Michaels, this poem doesn't go up because it's ready, it goes up because it's Friday morning.
Peter Crowley gave us a fine feature on Wednesday. Inspired by Kyle Rittenhouse, he started off the night with a poem about white supremacy. And as much as I like to have a poem run a gamut, this is not one of those poems. I've been frustrated with the so-called "citizen soldiers" being reinvigorated by Trump and just decided to go on about it. The results are what you have below, which I was actually wrote the first draft of Wednesday and finished up last night. Seriously, vote blue in November and get these sidewalk warriors to do a mass suicide in the streets. And thanks for reading.
Citizen Soldiers
White militias
hunt and dine
on red October
before election day,
their archangels armed
with long teeth instead
of blazing blades, robes
tattered like pulled cotton.
Petition to bring back
hangman, stay mute
on guillotine, which
judges everyone.
The very sound of red
in a language they
won't understand, learning
by computer too wrong.
Collective slept-through
science lessons convince
them: They're furthest
from death down in earth.
Stale anger punches
each other for warmth,
as if fists were igneous
rock, or flint hitting flint.
The Me Generation
huddles with New Me,
a team with no "I"
to see through storms.
This square gathering
will be remembered.
Remember, remember
first of September!
Rifles in the street.
Time to heal when they've
won, run ring around rosary,
assure self-forgiveness.
Survivalist handbook
never mentioned a thing
about masks, staying home
alone in the daylight.
What's a survivor to do
without even a zombie
or minority shuffling
to bang on a barrier.
Pulpit as air-filled
as popcorn, ready to
fire a round at thoughts
that they think are wrong.
Better to know nothing
than to think oneself
as finally obsolete.
Never a final body count.
Don't hit ground running.
Just hit ground, hit ground,
don't relent to ground,
stand on ground's throat.
Their ships will come in
with nothing but more of
the new indigenous inheritors
of our back-of-truck country.
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| Some just came to listen. Wrote them down by accident. |
Special thanks toEthan Mackler, Bil Lewis, Len Germinara Nancy Dodson, Nancy Dodson, Erik Nelson, Don Kingfisher Campbell, Patricia Carragon, Erik Tate, Diana S., Jon Wesick, Krystal McPhaul, E.S., C.C. Arshagra, James Van Looy and feature Peter Crowley.
1 comment:
Nicely done.
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