Stone Soup Croutons, 7-19-18, Morning Wake

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. That's right, I said morning. Don't expect it to be a regular thing, but it's good to be early again.

Stone Soup was last night. I'm especially indebted to the poets who allowed me to have copies of their poems. After work yesterday, I was too exhausted to even listen. This means I was able to mix ideas from their work around a little more easily than usual. I'm happy with this piece, though I will try not to cheat like this in the future. Thanks for reading.


Morning Wake

Too much to mourn
in one sitting. What first:

The shooting victims,
the shooter/suicide,

or the neighbor's cat
canonized on Facebook?

Mourning last year's
reindeer cast aside

for shadow of no trees,
an unhampered sun

uses world as game piece,
kings and pawns in check.

Try to eulogize, words
a gate to other lies

by omission of when
you had no time to morn.

No, you yell to the hate post,
the Jews aren't going to hell.

They're already here with us!
Though you know winter

is on is way, look forward
to survive with the inertia

of your backyard tree, just you
and your mechanical bride

who, though all the time
your fingers pulse its surface,

catalogues the secrets
you haven't  yet told.

Thanks Martha Boss, for being brave to take the number one spot.

Special thanks to Martha Boss, Chris Fitzgerald, John Lane, Jan Rowe, Vicki Poulos, Laurel Lambert Julia Vogel and James Van Looy.