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.
Nice short open mic this past Wednesday. A bit of a comedown from Friday, but I am already thinking of how to spice these open mics up. I'm also thankful for poets like Bil Lewis and C.C. Arshagra, who are going one step beyond the norm (see the first photo after this poem). Don't know if this week's poem reflects that, but I'm sure they helped. Thanks for reading.
The Non-Survival Artist
We put habit in our new habitats,
make our morning calls to Big
Brother. Why can't he start his
own live stream just to calm us down?
Inside, one painter keeps painting,
plans his death to coincide with
trash day. His constant mantra:
There is no artist. For creation to live,
the maker has to die. Better off
to remember the statues of naked
angels in the square than to ponder
the sculptor who groped them.
The children are already scarred
without knowing the seedy facts
of how their clay bowls were made.
Fallen angels would agree. Better
to rule obscurity than serve history.
Let guerilla theater be taken over
by gorillas. The better to empty
the seats as fast as they are filled.
2020 ticks away. Nobody expert
enough to disarm it. The painter is
ready to take all his hung easels,
tie them together into a one-way raft.
embark on his suicide family cruse,
get on the only right path. Before God
turns into the bratty child in back,
the painter stares down the ocean
like space, counting starfish. He
pretends the growing leaks on his
boat are are fountains stolen from the
park. Soon there will be nothing left
of him to come between his parents.
Watch him reverse transubstantiation,
turn his blood into water, empty out,
open his heart to feed an honest shark.
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| Bil yearns for Big Brother. |
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| Lee didn't read, Navah didn't want to read first, and I hate my handwriting. |
Special thanks to Patricia Carragon, Bil Lewis, Ed Gault, C.C. Arsagra, Erik Nelson, Carol Weston, Navah The Buddaphliii, James Van Looy, Erik Tate and Lee Varon.
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