Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions captured from poems overheard from Stone Soup's open mic readers and features. This week, I even added a title! I'm not sure why I was reluctant to use titles in the first place. Maybe it had to do with wanting to maintain the purity of the moment and thinking that adding a title the morning after the poem was written was cheating. If that was my argument to myself, I don't buy it now. Moving forward, I will be titling all my future Crouton pieces. Even if I'm not one-hundred-percent sold on this week's title.
Yesterday,
we had Lo Galluccio give a great feature performance to what started as a small audience that quickly grew to a diverse group of people both new and endeared to her work. Her open mic "grab bag" meant that people going up to share their work open mic could pick a random rolled up sheet with song lyrics selected by Lo. You didn't know what you were getting till you got it, and this resulted in some interesting pairings. The ones I remember off the top of my head were Elvis Costello's "Allison" read by Jonathan J. Joseph, The Beatles' "Come Together" read by Toni Bee and James Van Looy perfectly paired with "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen. This gave me even more to work with, and I was thankful for Toni Bee, who was reluctant to go up but then did her grab bag piece then followed up with an amazing free-style piece about her daughter playing basketball. It was fantastic and helped me put a pleasant spin at the end of this week's poem. Here it is. Thanks for reading.
Holding Court
From birth our eyes and hands
search for sticks and stones
or bathroom graffiti
or anything that can
strike others.
We yearn for our
descendants' pillboxes,
their placebo salvations.
We think it's all
we the living deserve.
