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.
It was great to have Erik Tate feature on Wednesday. We have Alexis Ivy next Wednesday, and I should be able to announce more features this weekend. Thanks to Erik for being one of the first to volunteer for our online feature series.
Erik has numerous unpublished collections, so he gave us a lot to absorb with his reading. I hope this week's piece did him some justice. Thanks for reading.
Pandemic Outcast Diary
We remember when we asked permission
to protest in our own streets, raised hats
to statues, as if hoping to be pulled up.
We finally gave up hope that the last
to be picked for sports teams will be first,
stopped looking for new dads in our bosses.
admitted that aliens and willing partners
go hand in hand with crazy fantasy. Sex is
not like a baseball game. At least in one,
they give you a bat, three tries per turn.
Outside your home, rabid dogs behave
better than unmasked men in Walmart.
Let Twitter trolls battle Tumblr faeries
or we won't stand a gopher's chance
to leave this tainted garden quietly.
Our good moods are a Russian play,
going down by act three. Like Freshman,
we sit back, put on weight, learn nothing.
Too afraid to create, aware lightning
can kill us on the way to the bottle.
We fill our hands with fireworks instead.
In the streets our parents are wearing
our old toy crowns, faces painted orange,
refusing our turns. They want to take
the outcast status they gave us when we
left for the cities, reopen our abandoned
playgrounds, make us clean the mess.
Special thanks to Patricia Carragon, Bil Lewis, David Miller, Linda Wlodyka, Ed Gault, Nancy Dodson, John Stickney, Jon Wesick, Carol Weston, Erik Nelson, Black Byrd, James Van Looy and Erik Tate.
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