I've been on hiatus since November and the last Stone Soup held at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery. In one week I start Stone Soup at a new location on Thursday, January 18, with Melissa Castillo-Garsow. That means I hope to start publishing Stone Soup Croutons every Friday after Stone Soup happens. After the last few years of writing in a furor every Tuesday morning, even writing an overdue piece like this feels like changing a sleep cycle. I hope I get used to it quickly.
At the end of 2017, I invited my Stone Soup Facebook group to submit lines of poems (either lines to unwritten/unfinished poems or fragments of finished poems) that I would turn into one last Stone Soup Croutons poem for the year. I didn't account from my end-of-year exhaustion (even we were hanging at my Mom's well before eight PM), and the poem fell by the wayside.
In gratitude to those who responded, I have finally cobbled some inspired lines from their pre-New Year missives. Not the most upbeat "new dawn" kind of piece, but it wasn't that kind of year, was it? Hopefully, I will be back in form by next week.
What's New
The captain of your own mast-less vessel
steers from one year to another
like a string of rebound girlfriends
until your body is wrecked, unable to tell
apples from oranges or from cannonballs
as all can now pierce your flesh.
His crew will welcome the first sight
of moneylenders at the dock, rushing forth
so they can deb themselves out of debt.
Smelling a mutiny forthcoming,
the captain sets up his own plank,
wondering what was ever keeping them.
Where now? What port will you storm into?
You welcome the bugs on your face,
pray they'll lead you into a lamplight.
Special thanks to Valerie Loveland, Mignon Ariel King, Joanie DiMartino, Tim Gager and David Miller.
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