SAFE DISTANCE EDITION: Stone Soup Croutons, 4-15-20, Things to Do in Your Head When We're Dying

Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions picked 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.

Another great open mic happened on Wednesday. My new microphone worked great. Zoom's view option that made the screen focus on whoever was speaking did not work as well, since it prevented me from taking any snapshots of the entire group. That aside, it's another pandemic-themed poem. Given how more than one poem from this week's roster dealt with the anxiety of being in a pandemic, it would have been dishonest not to go run with that. Thanks for reading.


Things to Do in Your Head 
When We're Dying

The almanacs,
the encyclopedias,
all fail to mention
that the Earth heals,
eventually.

The blood comes off
in a decade or five.
Sometimes the shooter
gets a reprimand.

Or we get the man
yelling on his corded phone
to forsake our screens
while another crank
writes on sandwich boards
to throw down our phones.

On an aftermath Monday,
we choose to rewrite
our uneventful Easters,
Bunny versus Kublai Khan.

Fiction and survival
go hand in hand, while
masturbation and poetry
both involve rubbing egos.

All you want is someone
to stare at  your head. Instead
they zombie march like cars
in old world commuter traffic.

You childhood monsters
come out from under bed,
remind you there's no
difference in the horror
between summers that never end
and autumns that skip a year.

Get to it. It's because
you've got the madness
that you've got this crisis.

Take another axe to
your dandelion heart
for food and drink,
smoke what you can't eat.

Everyone's in the same
neighborhood now. Everybody
lives next to a neighbor
with bodies in their basement.

Write with opposite hand,
start new correspondence
with yourself. Split three-
leaf clovers like atoms,
blow up your own luck.

I can't wait to not have to handwrite everyone's names again.

Special thanks to Erik Nelson, Elizabeth Doran, David Miller, Ed Gault, Jason Wright, Chris Fitzgerald, Tzynya Pinchback (sorry I misspelled your name on the sheet), Bil Lewis, Stephan Anstey, Thomas Gagnon, STeve Warren, James Van Looy.