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.
So great to have Charles Coe feature for the start of National Poetry Month. I hope all our readings for the rest of the month--heck, the rest of the year--have similar turnouts. A great mix of new and returning voices. Too many topics to keep together, though the subjects of rats and old age kept coming up. Really. But if Charles could bounce off the night's themes with what he chose to read, I can do my best with the poem below. This was a fun one to write. Thanks for reading.
The Midlife Shuffle
It's harder to get up and midlife shuffle
than do any trained or spontaneous dance.
It's far easier to pass the Fabergé egg
than it is to silently enter old age.
Easier for a rat to eat from your hands
(then eat off your fingers) than to
have your first hemorrhoidectomy,
though slightly easier than Trump
rhyming "oranges" with "origins."
They say it's easy to save face,
not so with yours. They say love
never dies, but they are also
talking about yours, and that's
a problem. There aren't enough rats
in your life. Your voice screeches
when you get the chance to talk.
It scares away the rats, the hawks
and most arguing strawmen.
It's time to finally get together
with the homeless people, bent
over from their holy benders.
Just angels and fellow animals,
not a sinner in the room, or the world.
You've not been slated to die now.
Time enough to betray yourself
a morning or two from today.
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| A great pairing of feature and open micers this week. |
Bil Lewis, Nancy Gold,David Miller, Martha Boss, Laurel Lambert, Shannon O'Connor, Matthew Gallaway, John Lane, James Van Looy and Charles Coe.
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