Friday, November 16, 2018

Stone Soup Croutons, 11-15-18, Things to Dwell on Before You Collapse



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.

Last night's open mic had a good attendance despite the snow. I was exhausted from the week, but I saw it through and pieced the following together. Thanks for reading.


Things to Dwell on Before You Collapse

Why do headstones rise if it's someone you know.
The ghosts remember when you used to buy them smokes.

They outsourced your compassion. Now they say they're celibate
by choice. Even the carpenter dissolved his toxic relationship

with the walrus. You are the oyster without a leg to stand.
You need to create a company, take on a new identity,

get married and give birth to a Bethlehem beast. That will
throw them off your tracks. Shave down your features,

blend in with the background of endless grey days.
The copperhead in your bed says he feels abandoned.

You ask your phone if electronic surveillance has you dead
to rights. It said Ask again later. Also, call your mother.



Really? No one could even take spot number 5?!?

Special thanks to Devin Simon, Paul Chandler, Erik Nelson, Bil Lewis, Jan Rowe, Laurel Lambert, Martha Boss, Carol Weston, Angelo D'Amato, Jr., and James Van Looy. 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Chad, you really have a way of pulling off "Stone Soup Croutons" every time.

Like all quality croutons, yours are redolent of the unique soup in which they've bobbed and swum, yet retain the distinctive texture of their creator.

Your crouton praises have been sung more pitch-perfectly than I could ever--not only by Yankee Magazine, Gourmet Magazine, the New Yorker, the Vienna Boys Choir and the Blind Boys of Alabama, but also by the mighty humpback whale, whose long-distance underwater songs are only now being recognized for their profound expressions of--and appreciation for--all things related to soup.

Yours in the bowl,
Kirk E.