Friday, April 23, 2021

SAFE DISTANCE EDITION - Stone Soup Croutons, 4-21-21: No One Gets to Choose a Hero


Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions picked from Stone Soup Poetry'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 an award nominated book out now collecting the best of my first year of poems. Click here to purchase it.

Thank you, Gloria Monaghan, for a wonderful feature on Wednesday. Gloria has a knack for bringing new voices to the open mic. In this instance, it led to a more challenging crouton poem. 

All those wonderful voices, and I had to turn it into a anti-humanity poem of sorts. Ah, well, it's the pandemic, so I can do whatever I want, right?  It was also slightly influenced (at least in the editing process) by the recent Derek Chauvin verdict and the ways people were already appropriating his memory. Thanks for reading.


No One Gets to Choose a Hero

Disco physics are hard to test
under spinning ball lights.

Hard to recreate the hustle
when you write it up in code.

Disco's not dead. Show 
the engraved headstone

or the discarded memorial
tree. Memory's a cartoon short.

We can only remember one day
for the only earth we live on.

We depend on calendars
full of strings for fingers. 

Do baby birds fly eventually?
Is Apollo to blame for sunlight

blinding drivers? Those who 
forget history march towards 

it anyway. random holocausts
stuck at bottoms of shoes worn

on blindly treading feet. Maybe
fires got stomped out anyway.

Dead don't need eulogies
They just want us to stop

bouncing off history's wall.
No slow dance over other

people's stories, please,
you snowflake seagulls,

you vultures with privilege.
War and atrocity aren't born

anymore, just continued. Turn 
the dial down from humanity

to manatee. Forget your blue 
heaven. It's back to the stables

with us. No wise men to validate
while leaves turn into turds. 

No one will take falling rain
and move it to someone else.

Wait for your time. Ask for 
permission to pick a flower.

You don't get to plant your heart
on any unmarked mass grave.

Let things die on own terms. 
Sleeping dogs no longer get free reign.





Special thanks to Jon Wesick, Bil Lewis, Patricia Carragon, John Stickney, Carol Weston, Jan Rowe, Nancy Dodson, Zachery Gaudet, Lilly Saki, Miriam O'Neal, Chris Fitzgerald, Joe Kidd, C.C. Arshagra, Jason Wright, Ethan Mackler, James Van Looy and Gloria Monaghan.

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